


Not the First

by EllieMorgan



Series: Only When We're Done [4]
Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-08
Updated: 2017-08-30
Packaged: 2018-10-29 13:20:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 24,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10854828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllieMorgan/pseuds/EllieMorgan
Summary: (Post-game, established Kandros/Ryder) Ryder returns to the Nexus in custody. Murder is more common than anyone would like, but Kandros refuses to believe she could be responsible. He isn't sure whether that's bias or reason.*Rating updated to 'explicit' for the second half of chapter 9.





	1. Murder

Tiran Kandros woke alone in bed, his omni-tool jittering in an attempt to rouse him for his shift. Four messages, he noted - he'd learned to silence the damn thing at night. He'd had another erratic dream, the faces of a group of mercs he'd helped kill at sixteen; he was left rattled, as usual, until they faded. Kandros very nearly uttered a prayer from habit, but the spirits of the Nexus (supposing there were any) were likely only of tumultuous nature. Maybe Ryder had been right, saying he needed vacation time.

She'd been gone for forty-one days. She'd been out of touch for twenty of those, after mentioning a repair to the Tempest. Watt had the nerve to suggest she'd "ghosted" him – he had to look that up, not proficient in Watt's language as he was in Ryder's, and he dismissed the idea once he had the definition in hand. It wasn't Ryder's style, for a start – but avoiding Kandros on the Nexus was also exceptionally difficult and made 'ghosting' downright impractical.

This day was the one hundredth since he'd asked to buy her that first drink. Kandros wondered idly whether Ryder would see significance in the number. They'd finally found their mutual comfort zone in the few short weeks before her departure, and foreplay in hallways was at an all time low. He wasn't ashamed to say that sex helped; it was much easier to be truly invested in a conversation about APEX dispatch when he could take her home after shift and screw her against the kitchen counter. It wasn't nearly as often as he'd like; this was a young relationship and he wanted her constantly, but they were both burdened by responsibility: Ryder had her work as Pathfinder, and Kandros had the difficulties of an exponentially increasing Nexus population. They made time where they could. Four - counting by number of evenings - wasn't enough for him to consider himself an expert in 'Ryder sexual relations', but he planned to become one.

He wasn't sure whether thinking about continuing long-term was a bad move by human standards. One hundred days wasn't enough to be certain they fit together - love often fell victim to incompatibility - but Kandros wasn't about to skip over an opportunity by assuming they'd burn out. Some weeks prior, Kandros caught wind of a natural winery that started up on Hyperion's arrival; after asking around, he was slightly disappointed to hear that the 'grapes' would take at least two years to bear fruit. He had himself added to a waiting list of buyers and simply considered it a damn good investment in his future self. He'd either date Ryder long enough to gift it or… well, he couldn't think of an alternative. Hopefully he wouldn't need one.

Spirits, he missed her.

Tann had been tight-lipped, and Kandros didn't want to stoop to desperation to pry. Addison had shared her own concerns about Ryder's radio silence. Kesh had no opinion on the matter, and Kandros wondered whether she wasn't in contact with Drack. He reasoned that, should worry really sink its claws into his carapace, he could ask. In the meantime, if anyone could take care of herself out there, it was Ryder.

On day one hundred and one, he woke to noise. He was jolted from sleep by banging on his apartment door at two in the morning - Kandros checked his omni-tool for the time and scrunched his nose at the mere idea of having thirty-seven messages. He blinked deliberately several times in an attempt to correct his vision, but the number stuck. Thirty-seven.

His apartment door opened on its own, and Kandros reached for his sidearm before he recognized Avitus' voice - "Lights," the turian Pathfinder said, and Kandros needed a further second to adjust to being half-blinded.

"What the hell is going on?" was the first and only question on Kandros' mind.

Avitus beelined for his wardrobe, yanked out an undersuit, grabbed Kandros' armor from the sofa, and dumped it all unceremoniously at Kandros' feet on the bed. He moved authoritatively; it reminded Kandros of the military in all the worst ways. "Hey," Avitus said as though it were a passing greeting and not a home invasion. "Get dressed. Ryder's been arrested for murder."

If Kandros weren't unwaveringly confident in his own alertness, he would have been struck by the thought that this was the strangest dream he'd had in a very long time. With little more than a grunt of discomfort, he forced himself up from bed, grabbed his gear, and sluggishly stumbled into the bathroom with the door left ajar. He stripped the casualwear he'd slept in and quickly tugged the legs of the undersuit over his spurs. "I hope this is your idea of a prank," he called out. The undersuit in place, he moved on to his armor plating.

"If I wanted to play a prank on you, I'd ask Ryder for tips. Doubt she'd find the distress on your face very funny." There was a pregnant pause, and Kandros found nothing to fill the silence before Avitus spoke again. "Do I use the word 'mate' for you two?"

Kandros secured the last of his armor and emerged, stopping over in the kitchen to tuck a ration bar into his suit. 'Mate' didn't necessarily suggest permanence, merely long-term investment with sexual involvement - Kandros supposed he and Ryder qualified in a technical sense, but he shook his head regardless. "I don't want that spreading. Use human terms. We're dating." He used the loan-word from the trade language rather than the one for 'courtship' in their shared tongue, though they would likely come out the same if Ryder's translator made an attempt.

"Dating," Avitus repeated experimentally with his arms crossed. Then, "Just wanted to confirm I wasn't totally off-base waking you up in the middle of the night. Tann didn't exactly explain the restrictions on you working together, but the rest of us wouldn't be Pathfinders if we couldn't read between the lines."

One of Kandros' gauntlets needed readjusting, and he did so. He was in more of a mood to listen than to hurry down to the cells uninformed. "You said Ryder's been arrested. I want your opinion."

Avitus looked down suddenly, mandibles pulled tight to the sides of his face, and then, as though finding Kandros' presence in even his peripheral vision too unbearable, he looked away entirely. It was an expression that was almost contrite.

"Avitus," Kandros prompted warningly.

"Guilt," Avitus said, his voice quieter than Kandros had ever heard it. "Just read the reports. I sent them half an hour ago."

The universe had gone mad, and that was the only explanation. Ryder was more than capable of killing in a skirmish, but cold-blooded murder? Something clear-cut enough to shut even a Pathfinder in a cell? It was unthinkable. "You're here," Kandros ground out. "Before we walk, I want you to explain yourself. I know Spectres aren't used to that." The potshot was probably unnecessary, but his usually mild temper was becoming increasingly difficult to restrain.

Avitus sighed - a sad, pained noise coming through his vocal cavity with the kind of proficiency granted only by middle-age. "I found Ryder with a pistol in her hand. Four rounds spent. Four dead meteorologists. One bullet to the back of the head for each one."

"Ryder doesn't carry a pistol," was Kandros' first observation. "What did she say?"

"That the pistol was theirs and she fired in self-defense."

"From behind?" he couldn't help asking. Kandros was no detective, but that detail wouldn't escape even the greenest Nexus security officer.

Avitus tilted his chin in an asari-like indication of agreement. "Consistent with the other twenty-nine bodies at eleven science stations. No one's asked her about those."

Faced with the overwhelming need to sit back down, Kandros settled for bracing his weight on his hands against the nearest surface, a corner of countertop which protruded at the edge of the kitchen area. He'd been kicked in the lungs before, but this didn't compare. "What about her SAM?"

"Agrees with self-defense."

That was barely a relief. "That should be it, then," was what he wanted to believe, but Ryder wouldn't have been taken in if it were so simple.

As though to confirm it ahead of saying so, Avitus still wouldn't look at him. "AI can still lie. Ryder's freedom is in SAM's best interest. Brings up some awkward ethical discussions about locking up the 'senses' of an AI that didn't do anything wrong."

Kandros swore under his breath. "There has to be more." He racked his brain to think of what that might be, but either the time of night or his own incapability prevented anything from coming to mind.

Avitus took steps toward the door. "Her story is too unlikely. I trust her, but I had to do my job. It doesn't look good."

He followed. "I know."

On reaching Ops, things were quiet. The lights were lower than usual, barely bright enough for any species to see where to put their feet. The exception was the holding cells, lit white for the sake of the cameras and a mild form of prisoner discomfort. Kandros had never thought about it before, but with Ryder in there…

He found himself stopped by the shoulder as he and Avitus approached, but with one glance back, Avitus continued on without him. Kandros turned to see a human man - and he realized, after a moment, that he'd seen him before. It took him two breaths to finally remember his first name. "Scott Ryder," he said to acknowledge his interrupter.

"I need to talk to my sister," was blurted out before any further greeting.

A somewhat inappropriately-timed joke, "I think you're second in line," passed through Kandros' mouth, but Scott merely looked confused. It was suddenly very clear that Ryder hadn't revealed their entanglement to her brother. How the poor sap had avoided the rumor mill as well, Kandros would never know. "Never mind," he said. "I'll wait. You want Lt. Sajax in the militia office. She can authorize it."

The confusion in Scott's face faded then, probably for the wrong reasons, and he glanced back toward the cells. "Sorry. This is your show. I'm just worried." He took a steady breath, calm as anything in crisis. Ryder blood for sure. "If you have to ask questions, it's fine. I'll come back."

Kandros merely shook his head, made a human 'go on' gesture with one hand, and Scott gave him a quick 'thanks' before heading off to his right. Kandros observed for a moment; Sajax and a human officer - Betrand, was it? - reacted immediately to Scott's approach. Sajax looked past, catching Kandros' presence for the first time, and he couldn't tell whether she was nodding at him or at the other Ryder. In either case, the discussion was a short one, and, now having a few minutes' spare time, Kandros lifted his omni-tool to finally check the reports Avitus had forwarded.

Avitus' account was exactly as he'd stated. He'd been sent to investigate outpost scientists dropping out of contact; what he found was death and Ryder. Autopsies hadn't yet been performed, but scans performed by the Kadara outpost's medic indicated all thirty-three bodies looked as though they'd been in good health prior to being executed. Times of death varied by up to two weeks.

Ryder's report was more involved and broken out by day. The Tempest needed a lengthy repair to one of the engineer's upgrades. Ryder requested she be dropped at Voeld; she planned to spend the time with a group of scientists studying the changes in atmosphere - probably, Kandros imagined, in a hurried prefab standing out against the ice. He could understand Ryder's continued curiosity about a change she'd helped bring.

On the second day, the comm tower went dark, and Ryder was assured that it happened with some frequency. SAM had the benefits of QEC, but she chose not to take advantage. They would give the tower team a few days to get it running.

On the ninth day, Ryder investigated the tower personally to find it unattended and sabotaged; she lacked the parts to fix it herself. At this point, she had SAM inform her team that she was going to be behind schedule. She offered the scientists evac, and they declined. That evening, she set up a beacon intended to attract assistance from the outpost.

On the tenth morning, she discovered that the beacon had been dismantled in the night. This put Ryder on high alert, and she encouraged sleeping in shifts.

On the eighteenth day, a shuttle arrived to check in; the pilot promised to deliver the latest reports to the outpost. (There was a note here, added by Avitus - no one reported to the outpost.)

On the twenty-first day, Ryder was attacked by the scientists. They crawled on hands and knees, chins tucked to their chests. They made for a box of mining charges - she was careful to note that she wasn't sure why they had those on-site - and attempts to simply incapacitate were ineffective. Kandros hoped the autopsies would show evidence of that. Ryder, despite knowing that something was terribly wrong, had been backed into a corner. She took a scientist's pistol and was forced to kill.

Her story was a preliminary statement collected by Avitus and entered into record by Sajax. Sajax would likely try a detailed interview in the morning.

Kandros didn't want to wonder whether he'd believe the outlandish tale from anyone else - that was his bias and exactly why he was restricted from working with her. Avitus liked her, for as much of a lone wolf as he was almost certainly accustomed to being, but even the ex-Spectre had doubts. After all, ignoring Ryder's statement, what did the physical evidence say? Thirty-three people, gunshot wound to the back of the head, exit wounds in the face. Kandros suddenly wanted to know angles - the angle of the gunshot would be a dead giveaway, wouldn't it? It didn't excuse eleven other stations, but Ryder gave no indication she'd traveled. Was there a chance she was only involved in the last one?

He looked up to see Scott talking to the supply worker. His status as a Pathfinder team member allowed him to make a few limited buys from their weapons storage - what was left of it, anyway - and the Nexus needed credits more than seventeen crates of low-end shotguns. Kandros briefly turned back the other way to raise a hand at Sajax (he was going to see Ryder whether the lieutenant liked it or not) and made his way over to the cells.

Ryder was there, of course. He supposed some deep part of him hadn't believed it until seeing her seated behind the glass, elbows braced on her knees and hands folded. She looked only at some indeterminable spot on the floor until, assumably, catching sight of movement. Then she looked at him, and she gave him a smile that didn't reach her eyes.

Kandros pulled up his credentials on his omni-tool, hovering his hand at the keypad. Security tech triggered automatically, lifting Ryder to her feet and pinning her in place against the back wall, and Kandros muttered an apology once the door slid open. He disabled it when the cell was secure; she landed well, catching herself before he could. He stepped toward her, took both her hands in his for comfort's sake, and pressed his mouth to the back of one before leaning forward to nuzzle her temple.

"I was attacked," she said resolutely. Pathfinder confidence died hard, he supposed.

"I read your report, Ryder," he replied. "That's not why I'm here."

Ryder looked up at his face and searched him, and for a moment he feared she'd ask why, as though it weren't the most obvious thing in the history of civilization.

He continued, "I thought a visit from your-" ah, that word. Watt's fault - ever since handing him the dictionary definition of 'girlfriend', Kandros had said it to himself on occasion, but he'd never used it aloud.

"Boyfriend," she supplied, "is fine. More than fine."

And suddenly words failed him, the term carrying more weight aloud than he'd expected. "That-" a false start. "Yes," he said. "I don't know what order humans…" Another. He took a breath. "You know how I feel. I didn't know if you saying it back made 'boyfriend' safe to say."

Ryder smiled a second time in the same way as the first. "I guess if you didn't believe me, you'd be breaking things off right about now." Kandros grunted unhappily at that, because it wasn't damned likely. She further said, "Scott mentioned you had questions."

"Scott," Kandros began with a reassuring touch of his mouth to her cheekbone, "didn't understand why I wanted to be the first one to see you. He jumped to conclusions. It was easier to let him go than explain."

"Which is why you're 'explaining' by behavior," she posited.

Kandros spared a glance through the glass at the male Ryder, who now had his hands stuffed in his pockets and was looking intently at the back wall. "He looks like he got the idea."

The laugh she let out was extremely welcome. It meant he'd given her some measure of happiness in this mess. "I can't tell whether that's exhibitionism or you being possessive."

"Neither," he said. "I missed you."

Ryder had always solved his problems. Kandros was damn well going to solve hers for once.


	2. Conspiracy

Barely an hour later, after Avitus and Scott had each departed, Sajax respectfully requested that Kandros leave the cell – and she seemed uncomfortable with that, unused to giving him orders. He perched himself outside instead, positioning a storage crate with his foot to sit on. From there, he watched the rare passerby from this different angle of Ops, keeping Ryder company by remaining in visual range, and he peeked at her every so often to make sure she knew where his thoughts were. She seemed to find it funnier each time, an honest half-smile growing at her lips.

Around 04:00, members of Ryder's team began to trickle in, a few angrier than others about the circumstances. Drack's grumbling and visible discontent caused two clerks to go on break within ten minutes of one another; the old krogan gave up shortly after and left in the direction of Kesh's office (though he'd be waiting a while, Kandros thought, because Kesh didn't usually turn up for another three hours). Kosta was surprisingly good-natured about the whole thing, making small talk with the guard. Harper tried to find out who she could talk to in the interest of getting the investigation dropped before it could go to trial – the practical answer there was that they shouldn't, for as much as Kandros agreed with the sentiment, simply because procedure meant stability on the Nexus. Nyx showed her face only long enough to get what she thought was a sneaky look at the model number of the cell door lock.

Kandros excused himself from the growing crowd to reluctantly report for his shift. Ryder mouthed something as he left, but he couldn't read her lips – the confusion must have shown, because she shook her head and made a gesture with one hand. It looked like an Alliance field signal for 'I understand', and Kandros was happy to see it regardless of whether he should be taking it at face value or considering it a sign of gratitude. He relaxed his mandibles, and she smiled. It was a very unique torture to know how her cheek felt beneath the palm of his hand and be completely unable to pardon her from suspicion. He was conflicted, because he should want justice to play out; concerned, because the structure of that justice was so undeveloped as to be unreliable; and pained, because they were again restricted from the ordinary course of affection he wanted to pursue.

He wasn't even sure what the Initiative could do in this case. If she were convicted, humans would be up in arms about not having a proper Pathfinder, unless Tann managed to convince Harper to keep quiet about lacking full SAM support – Tann was an idiot, but he wasn't enough of an idiot to impose capital punishment by means of a SAM transfer. And, even innocent, Ryder was too dangerous to exile.

Kandros shook himself of that line of thinking, because Ryder wasn't going to be convicted. He just needed to figure out what he could do to guarantee that.

At 05:00, Sajax went to the cells. Her interrogation of Ryder lasted for fifty minutes. Kandros didn't read the interview transcript; he knew what it would say. No one in the militia office spoke a single word to Kandros on the subject of Ryder, neither informational nor of consolation – they were either unsure what platitudes to offer or unwilling to risk upsetting him. He received a forwarded message just before midday, routed through Sgt. Nels, indicating that the autopsy report would be available in about two weeks. The number of bodies was an obstacle given current manpower, and Avitus had apparently put in a request to bring a forensic autopsy specialist out of cryo. The turian Pathfinder clearly wanted to have all possible information – why thaw the specialist otherwise? – but Kandros wasn't as confident as he wanted to be that the results would exonerate her. A trial couldn't occur before that report was filed.

Kandros should have eaten lunch by her cell – it would have been the proper, comforting thing to do. He didn't. Instead, he escaped to hydroponics, guiltily, and breathing came somewhat easier away from Ops. It wasn't exactly 'good boyfriend' behavior to need so strongly to be out of there; maybe the gloss was wearing off enough for his flaws to finally bubble up. He was relieved to find that he trusted her to forgive his missteps, and he was interested in one day forgiving hers, should she make them.

After a time, Scott Ryder sat himself down on the same bench where Kandros was taking his second bite of a tasteless piece of jerky. Scott didn't say anything at first, slouching comfortably to Kandros' left. Kandros finished eating and stood briefly to dispose of the wrapper before returning.

"So," Scott said finally, eyes fixed on a small potted plant across the path. "She, uh, usually has terrible taste in men."

"Not sure whether that's a compliment or an insult," was a quicker comeback than Kandros had expected himself to come up with.

Scott laughed, tucking his thumbs in his pockets and turning his head toward Kandros for the first time. "Compliment, I guess. You really care about her."

Kandros crossed one ankle over the other leg and tried to clear the fog in his head well enough to have this conversation. 'Make a good impression on the family' was the cardinal rule here. "I was surprised she didn't tell you," he said.

"I think she's catching me up in chronological order. Mission reports don't embellish enough to be a real Ryder family story." Scott's features relaxed into a smile, and he shrugged. "She had to go one by one and tell me all the good parts."

They sat in comfortable silence again for several minutes, watching plants and people. Scott loved her, too. There was a certain unity in that, and Kandros found himself glad for the other man's presence. He desperately wanted to help her. Even if Kandros could make his way to Voeld, any evidence he collected on his own would be in question.

And then it hit him.

'On his own', he'd thought. Going to Voeld at all was reckless, inadvisable, and very likely to piss off Tann – though just as likely to have Addison's and Kesh's support. Going to Voeld with company, well… Kandros pulled up his omni-tool, accessed the directory, and forwarded the incident reports to the potential co-conspirator beside him.

Scott's omni-tool buzzed. "What's this?"

"Witness statements," Kandros said. "In case someone could get us to Voeld for a look around."

There was a momentary pause as Scott skimmed the documents. "I like the way you think, Kandros."

They would need to plan, discuss options. Kandros followed the documents with another message. "That's my apartment number. Come by around 19:00." And he'd probably regret this decision, but he added, "Bring Vetra Nyx if you can."

"Why Vetra?"

"Resources," Kandros said, standing from the bench in anticipation of heading back to work. "And an extra gun."

Scott coughed out a laugh amid his grin, and he said, "Sure," before Kandros left.

He was distracted by logistical details for the entire afternoon. Requesting use of the Tempest from its pilot would probably do more harm than good – and Kandros had no guarantee that Tann hadn't barred it from leaving while Ryder was in custody.

Then there was the matter of the rest of the crew, who would likely want to be involved in any secret plan to clear their Pathfinder's name, and Kandros wasn't going to complain about an excess of manpower. Nyx on transport and supplies. They'd need someone on the Nexus as advance warning in case Ryder's trial came sooner than he expected or new evidence came to light – preferably someone with an implant, because SAM was a reasonable option for emergency communication among the Pathfinder team. Kosta might best fit that role, simply because he could probably weasel information out of anyone in the militia office. He hung around enough to know most of them personally, and he was nothing if not charismatic. Assuming the worst happened and Ryder went to trial, Harper would by far be the best at coordinating her defense – they hadn't bothered thawing out any damned lawyers, which had advantages and disadvantages both. Drack – Kandros was never too sure what to do about Drack. His two specialties seemed to be crankiness and violence. PeeBee, from what little he'd heard of her, might reject getting involved simply to avoid looking like a compliant team player. After checking, it seemed Jaal wasn't on the Nexus at all; he was on Havarl again.

Of course, this all assumed that anyone on Ryder's team would give half a shit about anything Kandros had to say.

Scott was prompt, arriving at exactly 19:00, and Kandros couldn't help but be amused by that; Ryder always ran a few minutes behind. What he hadn't expected was the hulking krogan in his doorway, with no sign of Vetra, and Kandros was too stunned to think to ask why.

Drack made his way over to the sofa, staring it down for a moment before kicking one of the legs - gently, for a krogan, but the sofa still jolted in complaint. "I don't know how you people ever expected krogan to sit on these. They're too small. And uncomfortable."

"Bed's free," Scott observed. "Hey, Kandros," was his delayed greeting.

The old krogan eyed it with his teeth bared, and he grunted. "No thanks. I know what he's been doing on that." And, despite it being 'small and uncomfortable', Drack somehow managed to fit himself on one end of the sofa without further complaint.

Kandros decided it would be a very bad idea to tell Drack what Ryder had done to him on that cushion.

"Vetra said she was busy," Scott explained, heading off the as yet unspoken question. He didn't sit, preferring to prop himself up against the kitchen counter, and Kandros remained standing for consistency. "She recommended Drack."

"Long as you don't have a problem with that," Drack mumbled. "I'll sit on your damn couch when Ryder needs it and Vetra asks, sure. What do you want, anyway?"

"Transport to Voeld," Kandros said, "and someone who can shoot. I can't force you to get involved. But Ryder –"

Drack interrupted by laughing, hard. "Let me see if I've got this right. You're asking me to come shoot something, and you're worried I'm gonna say no?" The laugh faded to a chuckle. "Look, I don't know what kind of shit you've been drinking, but I want some. With any luck, it might tickle. I'll do it."

Scott stepped forward and offered a handshake at that, saying, "Thanks, Drack."

Drack stared it down, grunted, and hoisted himself up from his chosen seat. "Your sister's a good enough kid, but I don't know you yet. Take your boy scout act down a notch. I'll get us a transport." Drack turned on Kandros next. "And you. I can tell when someone's avoiding me. Grow a damn quad. Putting up with the people who piss you off might keep you alive someday. Ryder can't keep saving your turian ass."

The temptation to counter with 'she probably could' was not very strong when faced with a scowl and the distinct impression that his comment wouldn't suit Drack's sense of humor.

The old man grunted again at the lack of any response from either of them. "I'll send you a message in the morning. Give you time to pack your panties." And then he stormed out of the apartment.

After a moment, Kandros tried to confirm what Scott said earlier with, "And Nyx was busy."

"Yep."


	3. Duty

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, difficult chapter to write. And the multiplayer getting patched ate up a lot of my spare time.  
> PS, thanks to Soignee for telling me off in several spots this chapter. :)

Duty was difficult to define. If Kandros were to ask another turian for an example of duty, they might say 'following orders', relying on a societal trust that your superior had the greater good in mind. It didn't matter whether the answerer were Hierarchy or mercenary - mercenaries simply applied the vagueness of duty to a different allegiance and a different definition of 'greater good'.

Kandros, for all that he wanted to convince himself of his own rebellious nature, generally followed the interpretation that had kept Palaven spinning for so many millennia. He believed in the necessity of a growing military establishment (though he had some disagreements with Ryder on the subject), and he believed in mixing politics with punishment in whatever manner might keep people sedate (though, come to think of it, he'd occasionally disagreed with her in this as well). And, despite a quick resolution to Ryder's case being an overwhelmingly personal desire, he also believed that contributing to her defense was the right thing to do.

Right thing for whom, he had no idea. Tann notwithstanding, Kandros only answered to himself and whatever vision of society his mind had settled on. 'A peaceful one', currently. The Initiative had barely handled the turbulence of the mutiny and subsequent krogan exit.

At any rate, his setting an alarm to wake himself in the middle of the night, solely to see her before leaving, was no sense of duty he'd ever heard of. It was want and impatience - or perhaps it was duty after all, but to Ryder. Kandros wondered whether that qualified as selfishness.

It was 00:00. Watt had drawn the short straw and was the senior officer on duty as one day merged uneventfully into the next. Kandros, fully intending to ignore his implicit agreement to stay out of Ryder's cell, told Watt to take fifteen to keep him out of trouble.

"Camera's been cutting frames," Watt said instead. "Think I'll have to reboot. Won't hurt to call helpdesk in the morning if I can't get it, yeah?"

Kandros chuckled. "Do what you want."

"You're damn right," Watt muttered, poking at his omni-tool. By the time Kandros reached the cells, he'd received a message on his own - an automated system alert to notify him of a camera's offline status.

Ryder was asleep, predictably. She slept deeply even in unfamiliar or uncomfortable places. Kandros nodded at the guard - Rallis, who nodded reciprocally instead of objecting - and was careful to override standard security before entering. And, finding himself unwilling to wake her, Kandros settled beside the cot to watch her sleep.

He'd heard horror stories about untreated snoring in humans, and he was grateful she never suffered from it. She laid on her side in relative peace, lips slightly parted, eyes moving beneath their lids - from what he'd heard, a human sign of dreaming. Ryder was wrapped tightly in the too-thin blanket, this cell several degrees cooler than his apartment, and only when she made the smallest noise did he stop resisting the urge to touch her.

It was gentle, at her shoulder, and not intended to startle. He managed it anyway, somehow - she jerked back in surprise for a single breath before realizing who it was, and Kandros moved the palm of his hand to the side of her neck. Ryder closed her eyes and smiled.

"I'm leaving," he said quietly.

Ryder groaned involuntarily, cutting herself off after a second and clearly not prepared for being awake. "Mm," was a more pleasant sound, a hum against her lips. "Why?"

"To prove your report."

That sunk in for a moment, and she showed no sign of surprise in the slightest. "That. SAM told me."

"SAM told you?"

She tapped her own forehead with a fingertip. "Private channel," she murmured sleepily.

Kandros let the thought pass that it might be useful; it wasn't why he'd come here. He took that hand in his, folding his fingers in and pulling it away, and he laid his forehead against hers. "The camera seems to be having problems. We could give the guard something to stare at." He was absolutely joking, and he carefully moderated his tone of voice to get that across.

It must have worked well enough, because Ryder laughed. But the discomfort of an audience didn't keep her from all action; she shifted abruptly onto an elbow and kissed the place where their heads had met before releasing his hand to drag him into something approaching an embrace. And she, with a better view of the outside by virtue of her position, said, "He has his back to us," and took another breath to say more.

Kandros didn't give her time to evolve that thought into a joke, because it was plenty incentive to kiss her. Kissing was still, to him, just a closeness which occurred - it wasn't a compulsive show of love or prerequisite to lovemaking, if only because his mouth was about as sensitive as anywhere else. Kandros enjoyed kisses because they were Ryder's, and he enjoyed what they meant to her. He also enjoyed what they sometimes preceded; he treasured memories of her mouth on his skin.

Spirits, he shouldn't let his mind drift to sex in a prison cell. "I'll head out," he said instead. "Wouldn't want to stage a jailbreak."

Ryder tugged him back to her mouth by the front of his armor, but only briefly. "Don't worry so much. I don't exactly have a motive to murder a bunch of scientists."

He tightened his mandibles against his face for a moment. She wasn't a politician, he had to remember, and if humans operated under a turian framework, their duty might be to freedom and equality - with all the same personal interpretations and moral ambiguity. After all, human-first organizations were not rare. Kandros spoke gently, "We don't have the luxury of judging guilt by burden of proof. Tann's going to want anything that avoids another mutiny. Sajax should be planning to handle protests, but someone's kept the journalists locked down so far."

Ryder grimaced. "It's that bad?"

"Yeah."

She sat up properly then, and Kandros came up from the floor, standing straight and sparing a glance for the guard's back through the glass. He raised his omni-tool to let himself out - but he hesitated, in the interest of confessing. "I should ask Avitus to look into it," he said. "But I'm done waiting around for the people I care about to come home. I did enough of that with the turian ark."

Her gaze flicked toward the floor, but she had a smile on her face. Kandros opened the cell door lock.

"Tiran." She used his first name so frequently now, but it never once failed to affect him. "Stay safe."

"I'll do my best." And with another nod to the guard, he left.

Watt was off somewhere, probably finding food. He didn't take well to the night shifts. Kandros grabbed a data pad to leave a general bulletin about his departure, and he sent a separate message to Lt. Sajax, who was probably more than sick of his shit by now. He knew she'd had a job offer at one of the colonies. He wasn't sure whether she'd take it. Tann received a never-used vacation request form, automated through a Nexus VI. If Kandros had any forethought, he would have tried removing the word 'request' - he was notifying Tann, not asking permission.

Kandros went home long enough to doze for half an hour. He woke three minutes before his alarm and, having no idea when Drack might send a message, spent the remaining pre-dawn hours in hydroponics.

Ops was always staffed, but hydroponics was dead quiet at this time of day. Half-darkness dulled the plants' texture at a distance, and the occasional light flickered somewhere behind the leaves as the irrigation system measured whether it was needed. He thought of bringing Ryder here. Their date location options hadn't expanded at all despite Nexus construction, but he hadn't considered time of day.

Kandros was worse at romance than most things, but that didn't mean he wasn't going to try.

Drack's message came through just before 04:00. It was basic: airlock number, passcode. Kandros reported immediately, greeting Drack by name and enjoying the silence otherwise. Scott took an additional half hour. With departure clearance and some hours to kill, Kandros forced himself back to sleep for the duration.

Drack shoved him in the shoulder. Kandros jerked back, his fringe bashing roughly against the bulkhead, and he would have reacted with more offense if he hadn't felt as though he'd been down for a full night. Instead, he pulled up his omni-tool to check the time; he'd slept twice what he ordinarily did and without stirring. It made some sense - the past two nights had been interrupted - but Kandros could have sworn he had the capacity to handle that sort of thing. Either a regular schedule or a few years' age must have spoiled him. Still, sleeping deeply enough to miss movement was disturbingly new.

"Navpoint," Drack demanded gruffly, and Kandros pulled up Avitus' report to send it over.

"Are we close?" Kandros asked. He glimpsed Scott returning from the front of the small ship, and the human flashed a grin as he sat down.

Drack chuckled. "About as close as we can get without falling out of orbit. I hope you have a plan."

"We'll look around," Scott said as though that were simple, and then he looked at Kandros. "If we run into any trouble, I think it's a good idea if you run things."

He hadn't thought about it in any depth. None of them had any real grasp of the skills the other two possessed, though Kandros could make some educated guesses based on equipment. He expected that Drack would be most effective at close range. Scott was more difficult to predict, carrying three weapons - a generalist, perhaps, though it would be difficult to read his style before seeing him in a fight. "That's fine," Kandros eventually replied. He could run them like a less-informed APEX squad if need called for it.

The pilot brought them down to Voeld's surface with no trouble, and the landscape looked brutal. If some god out of some mythology somewhere in the universe could be thanked for the invention of temperature control in hardsuits, Kandros would be on his knees. The HUD in his helmet placed the temperature at -45, which Scott jokingly referred to as 'mild'.

The prefab wasn't quite a small oasis of tech in a frozen wasteland - it backed against ice-covered stone, itself with a dusting of slush and marred by the krogan-sized mouth of a deep cave. The building had monitoring equipment mounted toward the back of the roof, and a non-functional beacon was propped up beside the front door.

Footprints sat fresh in the snow.

"Turian," Kandros remarked. "There are at least two. Scott," because despite his general habit of surnames, saying 'Ryder' aloud for anyone but her felt wrong, "how much can you get from SAM?"

"Information," he replied. "I can transmit scan data. Not a lot else, though."

The scanner was a good asset. Drack had already trudged toward the front door, clearly planning to barge his way in no matter what risks might be involved, and Kandros found no reason to object. For a windowless prefab with one entrance, the door needed to open sooner or later.

And they were alone, at least so far as the building. Kandros didn't need to see to know - Drack said nothing, and there was no gunfire. That left the cave, potentially, but it was too risky to explore unprepared and single file. Someone camped out in there could get some very good shots in before being seen.

"Drack," Kandros said.

"What?"

"What do you think of that cave?"

Drack stepped back out of the shack as Kandros approached and peered around to the opening. "Stupid idea to go in there, if that's what you're asking."

At least they were on the same page. "Keep an eye on it," Kandros said. He made an attempt to moderate his tone to make it more a request than an order. "Scott should scan the building interior."

"Sounds good," came from the human, and he broke into a jog to reach the door.

Smooth going so far, but Kandros didn't trust it. He drew his rifle and kept it low, moving to the doorway to watch Scott work.

A low rumble came through the comm, Drack groaning, and he asked, "He set off an alarm or something?"

Kandros glanced at Scott, who shrugged, and replied, "I don't think so."

Drack scoffed in disbelief, "What, you don't hear that? It's loud. Comes through the helmet."

Without a second thought, Scott yanked his helmet from his head, pressure seal audible through the open comm. "Nothing," he said after a second, but he raised his omni-tool all the same. "Something," was a correction to his previous statement. "It has a really low pitch, whatever it is. It's lower than I can hear. It looks like it's… pulsing."

"Sounds like a growl," Drack muttered.

The obvious idea was to track the location of the source, and Kandros suggested as much to Scott. Scott nodded but didn't change his omni-tool settings or the direction of his measured steps - it was clear that he'd thought the same thing, and the source was located in a matter of seconds. "Mining charges," Scott said. He slipped his thumb beneath the lip of the box, drawing a small chip and speaker slightly out of place. "That was in her report, right?"

"Mm," was Kandros' half-hearted confirmation. He didn't believe in pure coincidence, not to that degree. For anyone to behave the way Ryder had described, there would have to be some outside interference - whether sapient or not, that was yet to be seen. The possibility followed, then, that this noise had drawn affected scientists to the charges.

It wasn't a relief. He was struck by the possibility that Ryder had misjudged, that they were after the speaker and not the charges themselves. Kandros purposefully did not think about the other eleven sites.

Drack drew him out of his thoughts with three words: "Turn it off."

Scott complied immediately, yanking the speaker's single cable hard enough to detach it from where it had been soldered in at the other end.

Then, Drack again: "Movement. Someone's on the rock."

Kandros bolted out the door, assault rifle held securely in both hands, with his finger off the trigger. He looked up once he'd cleared the corner of the prefab - there was a turian there, in full male gear, palms open and empty. It was an intentional gesture, one that said 'I am unarmed'. A glance over the figure's shoulder showed that it wasn't entirely true, and Drack kept his own weapon raised.

Something clicked, finally, about the tilt of the person's shoulders, his height and build, and old lines of damage in his armor. Kandros holstered his rifle. "Drack," he said, "put your gun down. It's Avitus."

The old krogan swore in some way that didn't translate except by context, and he dropped his weapon immediately. Kandros mimed their channel number to Avitus, uninterested in working around the helmets and unwilling to freeze his face off.

Of course, after tapping his omni-tool to join their channel, the first thing Avitus did was let loose a single laugh. Not a bad sound from him, given all the stress he'd been under. "Drack gives you away," he said.

"Of course he does," Kandros replied. It was mostly a flippant comment.

"How are you doing?" Avitus hopped off the rock, jets kicking in at his back to lower him safely to the snow.

It was an extraordinarily casual question under the circumstances. "I'm here," should have answered everything. Ryder's situation was nerve-wracking at best, and Kandros wouldn't have left the Nexus otherwise.

Avitus' head twitched in a way that made Kandros imagine his mandibles flicking out inside the helmet. "Find anything yet?"

Scott's voice came through, but he'd never left the prefab. "Just an emitter of some kind. A growl, maybe?"

"The brother?" Avitus asked. He turned his upper body toward the building - not much seemed to catch the ex-Spectre by surprise, and even this reaction seemed acted instead of honest.

"Yep," came the reply. Scott joked, "I think Kandros is manipulating me for SAM. That's just a guess."

Kandros' answer was a half-truth but lighthearted. "I'm not convinced Ryder would stay if you didn't like me."

"Can't have that."

"You brought Vetra," Drack said suddenly to Avitus. It took a moment, but Avitus returned his attention to the krogan and answered in the affirmative. Drack guffawed. "Explains why she was busy. No way she'd let this thing with Ryder get fixed without her. I bet she told you she sent me."

Avitus shrugged humanly. "You're easy to recognize at a distance. Vetra's scouting the cave. She'll be out shortly." It was a quick segue into business. "That emitter," he said. "Did your SAM identify the growl?"

"Drack could hear it," Kandros replied. "We don't have more detail."

There was a pause as Avitus considered his explanation, or perhaps whether to give it. "It's the sound of a predator. No real threat to us – it's too small. They frequent a jagged range of mountains a thousand kilometers to the west. It's as lively as Voeld gets out there. Good protection against the wind."

"What does that have to do with dead scientists?" Scott asked.

Avitus crossed his arms, and Kandros realized that they'd reached the end of what the other turian had been able to discover. They were now on the same page, and they needed to press forward. "I want to know whether there are emitters at the other eleven sites," Kandros said. "We have three people who can find them: Avitus, Scott, and Drack." He looked to Avitus. "Three teams? We should have them cleared before nightfall."

No one objected to the suggestion, and Kandros wondered whether he'd made a mistake trying to defer to Avitus' Pathfinder authority by phrasing it as a question. The military didn't ask nicely; they gave orders. He and Avitus, the de facto leaders by Kandros' perception, would eventually need to talk.


	4. Raiders

Nyx took the opportunity to poke fun at Drack for doing exactly as she'd intended. The krogan grumbled some, tossed an insult, but ultimately accepted that she was simply trying to rile him up. Kandros got little more than a slap on the shoulder and 'bet Ryder's glad you're here' before Avitus filled her in.

Avitus could handle himself, and he would form a team of one. Kandros wasn't about to argue with a man who had spent fifteen years fighting the Council's enemies and keeping their secrets. Nyx chose to join Drack – to keep him in line, she said – and Kandros, by extension, would accompany Scott.

All eleven sites were within a few hours' walking distance, which didn't help disprove Ryder's involvement. They weren't all for atmospheric research, he learned: two were drilling beneath snow and ice in an attempt to determine soil composition over time, one was studying microorganisms in liquid water, and six were located at remnant sites. The original site, with two others, investigated different subsets of the atmospheric umbrella – terraform-induced climate change, local forecasting, and air composition. Kandros and Scott would visit four sites to the north, two of which were remnant ruin locations.

Drack's acquired transport was the only one still in range; Avitus' had returned to Voeld's Initiative outpost. The pilot was briefed and took them in turns.

"How did it happen?" Scott asked after they'd taken to the air. They sat helmetless in the warmth of the ship's main compartment, and he carried on before Kandros could ask him to clarify. "She told me how you met, but what she said sounded professional."

"It was," Kandros said. "We were professional." He found he wasn't really able to explain. He couldn't excuse that he'd watched her, that he'd begun trying to appreciate every hint of familiarity in her shape since she retrieved the location of the remnant city. Kandros hadn't supported her actions at the time – and he'd likely say the same thing again, with the risk as it was – but she'd stood at that console as they spoke, her palms pressed to the edges. She'd been silhouetted against a blue sky, lips pursed and brow tensed in determination and defiance, and Kandros' attention had detoured to her neck. "I took a bad hit," he added finally. "She found shelter for us, went days without food. I never asked whether she was delirious or just pretended to be." And Ryder had leaned in, nudged his forehead with hers, told him everything without saying a word. "She confessed," Kandros said instead, vaguely. "I asked her out for a drink."

Scott laughed once, and it seemed to be born of happiness rather than anything negative. "I guess that worked out."

Kandros exhaled sharply. "It's hard to keep track of time when you're traveling. This is," and he checked his omni-tool to be sure, "day one hundred and three, Nexus time."

"Do you ever think about where you're going to be in a couple years?"

The question wasn't entirely out of left field, but the first year of a relationship was so unpredictable that Kandros wasn't willing to answer with any mention of Ryder. "The militia is my responsibility," he chose as his response. "Nothing will change."

"She used to say, 'Anywhere else.'" Scott tilted his head back until it came to rest against the seat. "I asked her that when we were twelve. Asked her again when she joined the Alliance. Both times, 'Anywhere else.' You want to know what she said when I asked her the other day?"

Kandros suspected the question was rhetorical, so he didn't do more to answer than nod.

"She said, 'Here.' I actually asked if she meant the cell, and she laughed at me." The ship began to descend, horizon rising in the window, and Scott lifted his head. "Thanks," he said.

"We'll get her out of this," Kandros reassured in reply.

Clearing the first of their assigned sites was simple; the two connected buildings had enough windows that Kandros was reasonably sure of their vacancy before getting close. He kept his rifle ready on entry regardless, not willing to risk their lives on 'mostly certain', and he swept the place as Scott brought up his scanner for a look around.

"No noise," Scott said on local comm. "But there's something on the floor. Scratches? And organic material. Some kind of animal."

Kandros swapped over to the shared frequency. "No emitter at site E, but the scanner picked up evidence of an animal."

"That could be our little vocalist," came Avitus' voice. "I didn't find an emitter at B, either, but I did find adhesive. Same composition that held the emitter at the first site. I'll send you the data."

"Lucky we found one at ours," Nyx said. "Drack and I can't do much with adhesive composition or scan data."

"Check for scratches," Scott replied. "Cat-sized. It's pretty obvious on the tile here."

There was silence for a moment before Nyx asked, "Hang on, how big is a 'cat'?"

"Oh," said Scott. "It's–"

"I know about cats," Drack interrupted. "They're vermin. Small." There was a drawn out hum from Nyx that gave Kandros the impression Drack had motioned with his hands. "None of that here, though."

"Avitus," said Kandros. "Do you have a list of the sites ordered by time of death?"

"I can make one," was his reply. "Why, did you think of something?"

"Nothing concrete." Not yet, anyway, but there was now reasonably firm evidence against the hypothesis of an emitter at every location. Instinct told him that the data may make more sense in the context of time, once they'd completed their respective searches.

"I don't see anything else here," Avitus said after a minute or two. "Site C is close. I'm going to walk it."

Kandros switched back to local comm. "Anything else here?" he asked Scott.

"The scientists who died were almost all human, weren't they?"

He hadn't thought about it; he had to check the names in Avitus' report to confirm. "Twenty-eight humans, four salarians, one turian." It took a moment, but he bridged his omni-tool through the comm tower to retrieve the establishment dates from outpost records. "It makes sense. Hyperion was the only ark we had when these were set up. The Nexus didn't exactly ship out with a lot of specialists."

"No angara? I'm not sure it makes a difference, but if I'm at risk for going attack-of-the-zombies on you, it's probably better to know about it."

Kandros replied in the negative. "These weren't joint stations. We have plenty of those now that relations have improved."

"We're calling for pickup," Nyx said. "Not much more to look at over here."

Scott was making one final pass with the scanner, his arm swinging close to each crate of equipment and supplies in turn. Waiting, Kandros scanned the room visually; there were two terminals, and he wandered to the first to check what he could access unauthenticated. The files were mostly near-incomprehensible data on soil composition from this site's analyses, some data from Nexus labs, and very few personal messages.

"So, this is embarrassing," Scott began, and Kandros' first assumption was that he meant he'd made a mistake in his scans – at least, until he continued. "I wasn't expecting a turian. No offense."

That again, and Kandros surprised himself by not minding the subject. In some ways, it was a relief to treat his relationship with Ryder as more than a public-but-unacknowledged nuisance. "Why not?"

"Humans are nice, but you have to settle down with a real woman." It sounded out of character for Scott, someone else's words rehearsed and spat out with more than a small measure of disdain. Then, as himself, "Sorry. I guess I shouldn't have taken it as a universal truth."

Kandros traced over the words several times but couldn't come to any conclusions about the context. "I don't know what you mean."

"Oh." Scott finished up with the crates and furniture, and he tapped his omni-tool to close the scanning function. "We were about nineteen, and he was some stupid soldier on exchange who couldn't quit bragging about target practice. He broke things off with her after a month or two. He decided it was his duty to have kids, and that was how he told her."

"Idiot," Kandros muttered without thinking.

Scott laughed. "Yeah, I guess he was. You can't complain though, right?"

There was some truth in that, and it was something Kandros had considered more than once in his life. Any truly happy individual should ultimately come to the conclusion that the past was perfect as-is. Taking Alec Ryder's death as an example – if he hadn't died, would his daughter have died instead? If the ex-boyfriend hadn't been an idiot, would she have come to Andromeda at all? "No," he answered simply, because Scott was right. Kandros had nothing to complain about. Every little detail of his life and hers had led to the indescribable satisfaction he felt now, current situation be damned.

Their second assigned site, a remnant research location, showed evidence of the adhesive Avitus had identified. Scott passed the time telling stories of childhood mischief – mostly his own, some in cooperation with his sister: hiding caches of snacks with the daydream of running away, objecting to moves by refusing to pack their things, each of them starting fights and blaming the other. Kandros didn't recall being nearly as energetic, but he couldn't say whether that was the denial every adult applied to their own childhoods or simply a different human standard. It did not escape Kandros that Scott skirted around his parents' reactions to all this – or, in some stories, their existence. Kandros attributed it to their mother's illness and their father's distance, each of which Ryder had briefly described.

In that light, Scott's apparent approval of him mattered. Ryder cared about her brother, and Kandros never wanted to put her in a position where she might be uncomfortable having them both in the same place.

Their third site, another remnant research post, had been raided. The ruin itself was nestled into a small chasm; the prefab, dark and obvious at the top, was in the process of being dismantled and moved. Supply crates dotted the snow – food, most notably, had been opened and torn through. Initiative standard rations, which would have included some unnecessary dextro. Crates were dragged enough times through the snow that individual footprints became difficult to distinguish, with two exceptions: a salarian walked the outside perimeter, and a guard or overseer had paced beside the door – that one was human or asari.

"Human," Scott said with certainty, and he crouched down. "Asari distribute their weight differently. Here," he pointed, "and here. They run smaller, too."

"They're more likely outlaws than Initiative. Rare on Voeld, but not unheard of." Kandros kept his rifle ready as he ducked his head inside the door. It was dark, but it wasn't too dark to make out the walls. "They dragged everything down to the ruin. Scan for the animal. We'll need to follow the supplies." This instruction came out more like an order – an unintentional oversight, but Scott didn't seem to mind falling in line.

Scott ducked his head into the prefab as Kandros kept an eye on the chasm. They hadn't landed at a distance, so there was a chance the new residents would know they were here. Still, many of the outlaws were Sloane's people – current or former – or ex-military. There was no reason for them to be shy using a superior position to take out a mere two intruders unless something else was going on. Kandros ran down the list: either they didn't know and the ruin itself was soundproof enough to mute the noise of the ship, or they were salvagers rather than hostile, or something had occurred which related to this off-the-books investigation they were conducting. Kandros was most concerned by that last one.

"No signs of an animal," Scott reported. "We need to check the crates."

Kandros took another glance at Scott's back. Pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle – the last with a larger clip and a higher rate of fire. He wasn't a fan of ordering someone else to put himself in danger first, perhaps because he was still too used to being a front line soldier, but in some circumstances it made sense. Kandros swapped to his own sniper rifle: higher power, smaller clip. There was some cover afforded by the jaggedness of the landscape; Scott wouldn't be entirely unprotected.

Mostly, Kandros was concerned about a tactic he'd seen the Alliance use in a joint training exercise once: dig divots, cover them with camo sheets, and pop up when the enemy moved to a disadvantageous position. If he and Scott were caught unaware in that chasm, they would have nowhere to run. It was important to know whether there was cover down there that protected them from above.

Kandros swapped to the shared frequency. "We might have a few raiders down here. I'm muting this channel until we clear the place."

"Damn turians get to have all the fun," Drack said.

"I don't," was Nyx's reply. "I'm stuck here with you."

And Drack chuckled, "C'mon, you don't mind."

Kandros pulled up his omni-tool to follow through, but Avitus stopped him with a word, 'wait', and Kandros only swapped his output back to local to ask Scott whether he was more confident going down into the chasm with his pistol or his shotgun.

"Either," Scott said.

Kandros spoke in the shared channel to address Avitus. "Why?"

"If you're right, leak our frequency."

The suggestion was completely nonsensical. "I don't see what we gain by having outlaws listen in on our chatter."

Avitus hesitated, and Kandros wasn't sure whether he was distracted or annoyed that he had to explain himself. "You're better off if they misjudge your numbers."

Kandros couldn't think of any reason to reject the suggestion, and Avitus had more varied combat experience at any rate. The geth wouldn't have fallen for something like that. They always knew. Kandros remembered the sound of gunfire tearing through metal, old-fashioned heatsinks, and the taste of his own blood – he'd faced death dozens of times, but some encounters stuck. "Scott," he forced past the memory, "stay on shared."

"Got it."

Kandros briefed Scott on the plan: Scott would head in first, moving carefully between stray crates and cuts in the rock face, and he would secure any cover he found at the ruin entrance. Kandros would keep an eye out, playing sniper to start, and he would move in once they knew there was a place to go. It was the safest approach for two people.

There was no surprise and no gunfire, no one up top waiting to take the easy shot. Kandros joined Scott at a protected remnant door in short order, his body's equivalent of adrenaline keeping him more than prepared for a fight. The door itself had been cut open – scorch marks on the surface told him that much, and while it was pulled nearly closed, it was clear that the lock was inoperable. If these were anything like Havarl, then the ruins had their own atmospheric control. It might be downright temperate in there, excepting the heat lost by the broken door seal.

Scott pried the door open just enough to shine a light through. True to the usual remnant architectural design, there were several places to take cover, and they hadn't been shot at yet. Kandros held the door while Scott slipped through, and Scott returned the favor in turn. It slid back into place, leaving them in the dark.


	5. Sound

Avitus' suggestion to leak the frequency continued to bother Kandros in one significant way: he wasn't sure how he might implement it. Miming numbers as he had with Avitus wouldn't fly – humans, for which they had evidence of at least one, weren't likely to understand turian shorthand signals. Asking Scott to use the Alliance equivalent was far too heavy-handed to be believable. If they weren't outlaws or didn't open fire, there was no need for Avitus' plan; if they were and did, they wouldn't be amenable to negotiation.

The only plausible idea relied on making the outlaws think they were getting an advantage. His HUD put the temperature now at -5, and that was far more manageable than outside. Kandros looked around on the floor briefly, grabbing the first pebble he found – and when he chucked it down the hallway, the sound bounced loudly against the walls. It wasn't quite giving away the frequency, but if Kandros 'lost' his helmet, running comm on his omni-tool would make it audible. He conveyed this to the others, and Avitus agreed that there weren't better options.

The first sounds of life came two dark corridors later: honest laughter and some tinny music played from someone's omni-tool. His translator dropped words but picked up most of the goings-on; it sounded like a game of cards.

"Poker," Scott said.

Nyx laughed once, abruptly, over comm. "Just leave. We'll send Gil in, and you'll have all your stuff back in an hour."

Scott sounded appalled when he replied, "Gil's been trying to get me to play for months."

"Save your credits," Drack grumbled.

Kandros took up position beside the doorway and motioned for Scott to take cover somewhere behind. He slipped his head around the corner. Five humans, two salarians, one turian. They were definitely playing a game, and a human sniper, both hands on his gun, was distracted by it. He was probably the lookout – not a very good one. A quick glance around the floor told him that he didn't have the assistance of a convenient pebble this time. Without other options, Kandros popped the side of his assault rifle open and removed his unspent ammo modification. It was tiny, metal, and would make a very noticeable sound when it dropped to the floor.

His next idea was not one Ryder would have approved of. Shields were good, but they weren't perfect. A good sniper with a good rifle could drop a man through his shields with a well-placed bullet to the head. Kandros was relying on his suspicion that this sniper was not a good one. Unskilled or inattentive to his weapon – it didn't matter which. Kandros poked his head out again, watching, and he tossed the ammo mod to the floor beside him. It bounced twice before rolling.

The sniper caught the noise, saw his head, and Kandros forced himself to resist the desperate urge to duck back into cover – before he could think more of it, the glass of his helmet cracked in a spiral. His HUD went dark. Instinct kicked in more violently then, his feet making for the next available cover beside Scott as he tossed his helmet to the side, and he brought up the shared frequency on his omni-tool as his shields regenerated.

"Shot me in the face," Kandros said mildly. His breathing was accelerated, his muscles tense – but no outlaws appeared in the doorway.

Drack sounded genuinely angry when he spoke. "Turn that shit off. You trying to make me deaf?"

Kandros allowed himself to be confused for a moment. Allowed, because some dark corner of his mind had actually tried to be suspicious of Avitus' proposal with the shared comm, and he'd shot it down in the face of the ex-Spectre's experience. Worse – he'd shot it down in the face of personal trust that had, prior to this moment, been approaching friendship. "Rix," he defaulted angrily, "what are you doing?"

"I had a theory," Avitus said. "Remember, they were trying to shoot you a minute ago."

He had a sinking feeling that Avitus' guess, whatever it was, had been right. There was no reason the outlaws shouldn't be bearing down with every bit of firepower right now. That didn't matter – the end didn't matter, didn't justify the means. "Shut it down. Now."

If Avitus listened, Drack made no comment to indicate it. Kandros muted the channel regardless, leaving local open to avoid cutting off Scott. He stood and emerged from cover. His assault rifle dangled in one hand, and he scooped his helmet off the floor with the other.

A glance through the arch into the next chamber was something he dreaded. Deep down, Kandros did believe Ryder's report. It wasn't much of a relationship if he didn't trust her to tell the truth with the important things, and she'd shown no sign of delusion when Avitus picked her up. Scott's footsteps echoed behind him, taps of heel-to-toe that were louder in here than they should have been, until he stopped. They both stopped. Kandros breathed.

Any film he'd ever seen, turian or human or otherwise, portrayed a devolution into monster as a screaming, painful thing. Parts growing or being grafted where they had no business being, and torture as someone's body betrayed them. This was none of that. This was painless, suffocating fear. Simplicity itself. Half of them were already on the floor – the turian was seizing violently, and the salarians were as still as the dead. The humans had the worst of it. They fell gently, some instinct preventing them from hurting themselves – eyes wide, taking air in gulping breaths that didn't seem to be enough to quell their panic. They curled in on themselves, one by one, chin and knees to chest.

Kandros waited, frozen on his feet.

It felt like years when they unfurled, though it was likely only several seconds. They were different now, humanity stripped – another creature, a four-legged one, trapped in a human body. Hands used wrongly, calves taking most of the strain of a foreign posture. They bumped awkwardly against one another, blind or not sure how to process the feedback from human eyes. They understood ears: stopping, turning, waiting every time Kandros or Scott shifted so much as a foot. They didn't attack. They stumbled over the turian and salarians. The turian had stopped seizing, now dead or worse. This signal that only Drack could hear – it wasn't consciously processed, but their bodies reacted. The sound still existed.

The outlaws were affected. Their team wasn't.

"Scott," Kandros said, and he suddenly had the attention of five – well, five of something. "Ask Drack if Rix shut it down."

The muffled speech inside Scott's helmet was far too unclear for his translator to pick up on, but, after a beat of silence, Scott nodded. Kandros re-opened the shared channel. "They're docile, Rix. What the hell were you thinking? These are people!"

"Docile?" was, of course, the one word Avitus latched on to, in his sea of Spectre-trained detachment.

Kandros would regret it later, but he took the opportunity for a low blow and show of authority in one. "I don't care if you left your heart on the Natanus. Ryder doesn't need a Spectre."

No one said a word. There was a breath – from Avitus, he imagined – startled, hitched.

And Kandros, in all his enraged wisdom, pressed on. "A bullet to the head would have been kinder." His lack of fear at the moment was stupidity, wanting to prove an immature point. Scott tried to stop him by grabbing his shoulder, but Kandros pulled away, storming into the next room – spirits, the holo-cards were still there, fresh hands that would never be played – and the ex-humans scattered when he came close. "One turian and two salarians are unresponsive. Five humans are affected." He tilted the turian's face with one hand to get a better look at him. He knew who it was. Several of the humans as well, on closer inspection. They were Sloane's people. "Nyx," he said specifically, "these people need medical attention. Get in touch with the outpost."

"Don't think they'll rush to share their medical supplies with exiles," she said.

"Try. Whatever we're dealing with, it killed thirty-three of ours."

Avitus finally spoke, his voice forcefully steady. "Execution did."

Kandros didn't lash out; Avitus wasn't saying that to be argumentative, simply factual. "If I hadn't muted the comm, they might have turned violent. I won't take that chance." And, because he was now in the mood to be blunt, Kandros added, "You need to decide which of us is in charge."

It didn't take Avitus nearly as much thought as Kandros had expected. "I'll defer to you," Avitus said. "I haven't had a team in years. You have more experience."

Kandros' relief was intermixed with guilt and discomfort. Avitus outranked Kandros by almost any measure. Despite putting his foot down in this case, it didn't feel the least bit correct to be issuing orders to a Pathfinder, least of all one with the word 'Spectre' floating around. It was all backward, somehow – like an average ship's captain telling the Primarch what to do. Kandros tried to put more stock in his own position of authority, but Pathfinders had very nearly risen to myth and legend before Ryder actually turned up.

To hell with perceived rank, Kandros thought. He was putting an end to this for Ryder's sake. He pressed on. "What was your theory?"

The confidence returned to Avitus' voice. "Did you read Ryder's interview transcript?"

"No," Kandros replied. He should have.

"Ryder provided her own supplies."

He saw where Avitus was going. "You suspect something was contaminated?"

"We aren't affected. Neither was Ryder. Something specific to these sites set it off and didn't get everyone."

Nyx interrupted briefly to let Kandros know that an outpost shuttle was on the way.

Kandros turned to Scott. "Scan the rations and medical supplies. Take samples. If the outpost doesn't have the facilities to run an analysis, the angara will. Lock down the rest of the cargo with a biohazard warning. Should discourage theft." To Avitus, he said, "Avitus, get a beacon online. I want a generic warning to avoid all salvage operations on these sites. The words 'lethal biohazard' should do the trick." Supposing no one dismantled it, anyway. He moved on. "Nyx, do you think anyone from Kadara will trust that beacon?"

"Not a chance," she chuckled. "They'll think you have something expensive."

"Make sure Sloane knows it's my warning." It was a gamble, but a fairly strong one. "She isn't stupid," was something he truly believed, and it went unsaid that he thought Sloane still trusted him to some extent. And, finally, "Drack –"

"No," the krogan said. "You all can scurry around like hyperactive pyjaks. I'm gonna wait until there's something to shoot at. Besides, my head's still ringing from that shit your Pathfinder did, and my hearing wasn't all that great to start with."

Kandros' mandibles clapped back to the sides of his face. He should have seen that coming, but there was no real harm done. "If you could ask your pilot to run pickups," he suggested anyway.

Drack growled at the proposal but didn't argue. Kandros would have to wait and see whether he followed through.

The rush of authority waned as he waited, and Kandros muted both channels before heading for the surface to wait. He reconsidered that decision the moment he pried open the door. His helmet was too damaged to use against freezing cold – he left it there on the floor to retrieve later – but stubbornness and a need for fresh air kept him going.

Even without emerging completely, he could see an unfamiliar shuttle at the mouth of the chasm. Something didn't sit right. He unmuted and brought up shared comm. "Nyx, what's the ETA on that shuttle from the outpost?"

"Half an hour," she said.

Shit. Kandros spun back around to see the door sliding back to nearly-closed behind him – cloak, and a step up from that shit the kett used. He didn't take the time to switch channels. "Scott, we have an uninvited guest, cloaked."

"On it," he replied, and Kandros hoped to hell that Scott was prepared.

"Emitter near you," Drack warned. "I can hear it."

It wasn't really the time for this, but that gave Kandros an idea on how to make the signal audible later on. He shoved his way back through the door and sprinted, double checking his shields and medi-gel supply with a glance at his wrist, but he was met at the second corridor by two of those humans. Their foreheads were nearly pressed to the ground, and their stance was something Kandros interpreted as 'aggressive' – shit, his omni-tool. He hadn't muted the channel. Kandros rushed to do so now, far too late.

One of them was on him immediately, fingers grabbing at his wrist, one foot coming around to rest its entire weight on his left spur – even through a pressure-rated hardsuit, that hurt like hell, and Kandros let out an involuntary yelp. He tried twisting to toss the thing off, bashed it in the face with the butt of his gun. Her – its – boots lost traction, but the hands held firm. The second, as though frustrated by the lack of success, joined it. It dragged its way up his shoulder, fingers raised toward his eyes, settling for his mandible when he turned his head –

Spirits, he couldn't avoid hurting them. He pressed his rifle to the thigh of the first and fired at a safe angle from his body, throwing the butt of his gun against the side of its knee when the recoil of injury gave him space to do so. The second, still busied with tearing his mandible from his face, was nearly dislodged with a shove – which Kandros promptly regretted as he felt flesh finally give way and bleed for the increased pull. He bent forward and couldn't loose its grip. He fired once into the man's ribs at an angle, and his face was finally free.

Kandros hadn't known the woman, but the man was named Waters. He had a wife. They weren't unconscious, were listening, bled painfully from their respective gunshot wounds and nevertheless crept forward for another go – Kandros ended it, out of respect. He muted both channels for safety.

He sincerely hoped Scott had managed to pin down that cloaked figure. With no means of contact, Kandros would have to go find out the old-fashioned way.


	6. Paralysis

Parts of the current situation still didn't make sense, and Kandros didn't have the luxury of time to consider it in detail. He found himself concerned for Scott's well-being - in part the same way he considered all soldiers under his command, but also by proxy. There was danger, of course; Kandros didn't have enough experience with Scott to know how capable he was, though being on the Pathfinder team was promising. With effort, Kandros managed to set aside even the thought that Ryder would never forgive him if something happened to Scott under his watch. There would be time to consider it - all of it - later.

Three shots rang out in quick succession. Single bullets, with a breath between them - whose? And there was a blur that Kandros swore he could half-see against the light, footsteps echoing past him in the corridor. When he reached an arm out in an attempt to block passage, it was gone.

Another bullet was fired in the main room.

Kandros swore to himself. Assuming that blur was their intruder, he or she would take precious minutes to track - with gunfire ongoing, he had more pressing issues. Kandros sprinted forward to the archway, stopping himself at the lip to peer around the corner. He still had enough of his wits to avoid jumping blindly into a fight.

The scene he found was too familiar. Scott stood between the ex-humans and a crate, uninjured. One was already on the ground, and another lunged - he fired his pistol once, from above, as its chin was pressed into its chest. Entry wound to the back of the head. Exit in the face. Scott turned to the other, aimed, waited the heartbeat it took for the creature to move. When it did, he fired a second time. Entry wound to the back of the head. Exit in the face. With luck, they were otherwise healthy on a preliminary scan. Scott's exhale was visible from ten meters.

It was stupid that Kandros felt like laughing. The entire encounter had been a disaster - they'd lost so much information with the humans dead - but spirits, the relief. He'd seen the scene legitimately played out as Ryder had put in her report. If he'd felt comfortable using the word 'giddy' to describe himself, he'd have admitted to it in a heartbeat.

As it was, Kandros entered the room to check the other outlaws. The turian was first; there was a mark in the floor beside his head, but he was breathing.

Scott tried to say something - it came muffled through the helmet, and Kandros scrambled for the human signal for 'hold on'. He remembered it after a moment, one finger raised and probably looking silly on a three-fingered hand, but Scott got the idea and waited for Kandros to unmute comms.

Their cloaked visitor must have gotten a glance at the frequency while Kandros stood outside. He wouldn't have been a target otherwise - his own audio input wouldn't have looped back through his omni-tool. Unmuting now didn't hurt anything; there weren't any humans left alive to react. "Careful what you say," he said on shared. "I think this frequency is compromised." He received four quick acknowledgments.

"He was salarian," Scott said. The cloak user would know what Scott had seen; that much wasn't sensitive. "I caught him pulling the lid off the crate. He threw an emitter at my head, tried to finish off the other three, and booked it down the hallway."

Next, Kandros checked the outlaw salarians, who weren't as lucky. One was dead; a bullet through his skull had ensured that. The other was breathing shallowly with a wound to the torso; a collapsed lung was possible, but Kandros was by no means an expert in salarian anatomy. There was blood everywhere, green and slick. Kandros checked the salarian's softsuit first - no medi-gel injector, so Kandros took apart his own. Three doses was probably excessive, but if he could save one more...

It was taking too long, and Kandros needed to verify they were truly alone again. "Go," he told Scott. "Sweep the area. There was a shuttle outside, and I need to know if it's still there."

"Right."

With Scott gone and the salarian outlaw as stable as Kandros could make her, there was finally room to think. Kandros rubbed the side of his face - he flinched, having forgotten the damage to his mandible. It was still bleeding, an ugly blue against his gauntlet. Ryder would bleed red, his mind unhelpfully interjected, and Kandros hoped never to see more than a few drops of it.

He stood with some difficulty, his body reacting to the recent trauma of a fight with complaint; the dull, deep soreness in his muscles would take a day to fade. Bloodied and battered, he mused, when he hadn't realized his own injury five minutes prior.

The crate Scott had referred to was labeled basic medical supplies - which meant medi-gel and gauze, usually. The lid was loose, as described. Kandros lifted it off, bringing it to rest against the side, and sifted carefully through the contents. 'Potentially tainted' was a stray thought - Scott hadn't had the chance to say whether SAM's preliminary analysis turned up anything interesting.

Near the bottom, glued to the corner, was a piece of equipment no larger than his thumb. It was generic-looking enough that its function was difficult to discern, but it didn't appear to be explosive. It was probably best to wait to determine its function until it could be safely discussed, and Kandros didn't want to risk damage by tearing it from the adhesive. He left it in place.

When Scott returned, it was with a negative on the unknown shuttle. However, he also came accompanied by three medics and two security officers from the outpost - too many for so few people after the cloak user's visit, but that couldn't be helped. They evacuated the two who remained and left the dead for a second pass. Drack's pilot delivered their team to the outpost when all was done, and the first order of business - over dinner, so perhaps the second order of business - was choosing a new frequency on which to operate.

"I scanned the med crate," Scott said afterward, punching the new code into his omni-tool for later use. He picked his fork back up to shovel something yellow into his mouth. "It looked like some kind of data recorder. It was capturing basic vitals on anyone in range and sending them off somewhere. SAM got a navpoint about fifteen hundred kilometers out."

"Hm," Avitus said. "Explains how your cloaked friend knew you were there."

Kandros could barely look at Avitus; Spectre he was, but Kandros had gotten used to Ryder's Pathfinder ideals and hadn't expected the representative of his own race to be quite so brutal in method. Respect for life, in Kandros' experience, wasn't exactly in the Spectre DNA. At any rate, he disagreed with Avitus' theory. "No, it was too fast. Probably after the outlaws. We know he or she likes to clean up." They would have found emitters at each site otherwise.

"Probably both," Avitus amended after a moment, and Kandros had to concede the point.

Nyx excused herself first. Kandros was second, following her out for - well, he wasn't entirely sure what. But when she said 'come on' and ushered him into the nearest research lab, he didn't complain.

"You don't look so good," she said.

Kandros couldn't help but chuckle at the bluntness of it. "That obvious?" His injured mandible moved uncomfortably against the bandage one of the medics had placed on it. "I think about her," he said, and Nyx crossed her arms and put most of her weight on one foot - Kandros interpreted the look she was giving him as 'of course you do, you idiot' and shook his head in response. "I know."

Nyx exhaled sharply. "Sometimes I think you're a stuck-up military ass. But," and her mandibles dipped slightly in honesty, "it gets to you, doesn't it? Ryder's fine." His translator corrected some slang in her dialect on the last word, jarringly, but he concentrated more on the sentiment.

"I hope that's true," he said.

Of course, then it was her turn to laugh - a snort against her tongue at first, suppressed, and then genuine. "I'm not comforting you, Kandros. We're not that close. She's really fine, I promise. I got a call through." And, when Kandros opened his mouth to speak, she interrupted with: "Just a two minute chat. And no, I can't tell you who set it up."

That wasn't what he was after, of course. Kandros wasn't dim enough to think she'd be anything other than tight-lipped about her contacts, particularly those among his ranks. "Thanks for the help," he said instead, and he was absolutely going to commit that look of surprise on her face to memory.

"Does Ryder know you're a romantic?" Vetra asked, her mandibles wide in a smirk - and, damn it all, now he was using her first name in his head. That was a bad sign that his opinion of her was now more positive than not.

Even so, Kandros had no intention of answering the question. "Get some rest. I'm going to see how the survivors are holding up."

"Sure."

It occurred to him the moment he turned away to find the medical wing that he was tired, injured, and should probably be finding a place to sleep. But he was also impatient and nervous. Vetra hadn't been wrong about Ryder's situation eating away at him; he worried for her reputation and her future. Spirits, he'd done enough damage to both of those himself.

A memory of her skin came to mind, unbidden. She was soft in every place, unusually so by turian standards, but her reaction to his hands on her breasts or pressing his palm down halfway between her navel and her sex while he -

And then he was walking through the door to medical, meaning to do something professional but swimming in the heat he'd managed to curse himself with over the short walk. There was that phrase humans threw around every so often - 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' - and Kandros was beginning to appreciate it. Spirits, no, not just in the physical sense - though he supposed that right now he needed a phrase more like 'absence makes the hormones act up when you haven't been with your lover in six weeks'. This was juvenile and embarrassing at the least.

One of the nurses asked if he was all right, and Kandros waved him off. The doctor on shift - one of the medics who had retrieved their pair of survivors - caught his attention with a raised hand.

"Merric, med staff," she said to introduce herself. "And you're Kandros. Thank god we're an outpost, or I wouldn't be able to tell you half the weird here without getting Personnel down my pants."

Kandros couldn't help but flare his mandibles in amusement - and he regretted that, because it hurt like hell on the one side. "Fill me in," he said.

"Parasites."

That was not what he expected. "What?"

"Parasites," Merric repeated. "Nothing I've ever seen before, but they went right for the nervous system in both species. I can't figure out how they got there."

Kandros thought back to Avitus' theory - tainted supplies, food or medical. "Could they come from the digestive system?"

"Maybe. There's some esophageal scarring, but that's common. Some of the local foods taste amazing after being stuck on ration bars, but they can be pretty hard on the flesh as they go down. Dangerous-hard if you eat too much. We learned to ignore it, mostly, and people indulge their small cravings."

Feasible, then. Kandros changed the subject. "How are they?"

She extended a hand to the unconscious turian. "Frankly, turian biology is just plain incompatible. That seizure you reported is the least of this guy's problems. We'll evaluate over the next couple days, but as far as we can tell, he's brain dead. The other one," and Merric turned toward the salarian, "will probably be fine, if we can get those things out. She's paralyzed. It doesn't look like the parasites were able to root in like they wanted. We're waiting on some parts from the angara so we can set her up for a chat." She stopped, breathed, braced herself, and spoke directly to the patient: "And we will definitely get those things out, you hear me?"

There was no visible reaction, not so much as the twitch of a muscle. Kandros flinched, imagining being conscious and trapped, and empathy clawed forward. "Can you sedate her?"

Merric shrugged. "If she wants. We'll find that out in an hour or two."

Kandros rubbed his fingers against the center of his forehead in anticipation of a headache that never came. "All right. I'll keep my team off your back." By that, he meant Avitus. "The last thing she'll need is an interrogation."

"I'm sure she appreciates that. God knows I do."

Exhaustion was catching up, and he'd run out of obvious questions. He wanted - spirits, he didn't know what he wanted. "Beds?" he queried.

"Newest prefab," Merric said. "Go back as far as the kitchen, turn left."

Kandros thanked her, an absentminded formality. He pulled up his personal logs on his omni-tool as he walked, paying occasional attention to where he was going. Tempting as it was to play back one of Ryder's audio messages, he didn't have a way to keep it private. Kandros pulled up an older text conversation instead, from sometime before this mess, and he found one he'd kept for its simplicity: 'You're handsome.' She'd sent it tipsy and sitting right beside him, but it - well. He wasn't exactly considered handsome at home, and humans didn't consider turians handsome in general, but if Ryder thought it, then he wasn't going to complain.

Somehow, on reaching the room and settling into a bunk, Kandros managed to fall asleep despite Drack's snoring.

 


	7. Comfort

Kandros wrote a report for Tann before breakfast, and he included Sajax on the message. This required him to reluctantly check for new e-mail, and there were only two he cared about: in the first, Tann berated him for abandoning his duties and threatened disciplinary action; in the second, Kesh thanked him for Tann's upset and called it the best show she'd had in years. There was nothing from Sajax, which wasn't unexpected – she wasn't allowed to speak with him on the subject of Ryder.

His mandible was less sore this morning. The medi-gel had clearly done its job, and he carefully peeled the bandage from his face. It stuck uncomfortably to the remnants of a topical antiseptic, and he rinsed it thoroughly when he showered. Spirits, he was sore. His left spur was still tender, but he attributed most of the rest to strain rather than lingering bruises.

Clean and dry, his only interest was in a dextro ration and speaking with Avitus. That discussion was short and conducted with food in his throat – he wanted the promised list of sites in order by time of death, and Avitus was in the best position to provide. It took two minutes, long enough for Kandros to fit the rest of the grainy bar past his own disgust.

Avitus hummed as he handed it over, seeing immediately what Kandros had suspected: the sites at which they'd detected traces of an animal were earliest on the list, those with adhesive followed, and sites with remaining emitters were last.

"They couldn't reproduce the sound at first," Kandros surmised. He brought up his omni-tool and forwarded a copy of his report to Avitus. "You'll want to read the last section. The medic on duty last night found parasites."

"We should have checked that navpoint," Avitus said. His mandibles were tight to his face, and he didn't take his eyes off the report; he wasn't ignoring the parasites, merely processing information. "Whatever we might have found there is long gone."

Kandros didn't necessarily disagree, but going earlier might not have helped. "They could have taken it out while we regrouped. We'll head out in a few hours and dig around in the ashes. Might find something they missed."

"Whoever it is, they're not professional," Avitus speculated. "Missed a headshot on two out of three targets."

"So, more than one person?" That voice was Scott's, distorted by something wet in a bowl that he was shoveling into his mouth with a spoon. He stood in the doorway, one shoulder on the frame. It wasn't a light breakfast judging by the size, and Kandros wondered idly about biotic potential in the family. Scott continued after swallowing, "Someone shot twenty-nine people in the back of the head and didn't miss any of them."

It wasn't unlikely, but it would have required that the culprits change staff to deal with the outlaw issue. The reasoning there could be anything – that there were so many outlaws, that the outlaws were armed to the teeth, that it was a second pass, or simply because the original marksman wanted to sleep in.

If there wasn't anything at this navpoint, they would need a new plan, new leads to follow. There were other threads, little details ignored or unknown thus far: the source of the animals, the culprits' motive, and the relationship between the growl and the parasites. He suspected the last of those would be interwoven with the first. So far as the motive – science or military. In either case, it was very likely that the operation was driven by greed, which meant a not-insignificant chance that they were communicating off-world.

Kandros slipped back into the mantle of command far more easily than the day before. "Scott and Drack with me. We'll check Scott's navpoint," he said. Kandros was concerned for a moment that Avitus would spew some objection, but the Pathfinder was silent and showed no visible sign of unrest. "Avitus, I'll ask you to use your Pathfinder authority. Half the people around here don't have a reason to do me any favors. I want Vetra to have access to the comm tower logs. Between that and her contacts, she should be able to pull out any shady transmissions. I want you to grab data on the range of these animals. Blake's in charge here. Talk her into loaning you a science shuttle. See if you can't find any buildings out there, documented or undocumented."

"Yes," Avitus replied, and Kandros thought he heard him clamp down on another word that sounded suspiciously like the beginning of 'sir'.

Kandros relaxed at that, unable to suppress a warm chuckle at the clearly old, military-ingrained reaction to orders; Avitus looked genuinely confounded at his own slip-up, eyes narrowing and mandibles flicking against his face. But even the ex-Spectre's befuddlement devolved into a sharp laugh and a muttered apology. "I didn't sleep well," was Avitus' poor defense.

A weight lifted from Kandros' chest that he hadn't known was there – there was no more tension or conflict of command for this operation. Kandros moved to pass both of them, Avitus first with a friendly pat on the shoulder, then Scott with only a nod. He'd track Drack down for a quick brief, and they would depart as soon as possible.

Drack laid into his pilot for complaining about the length of this 'short' excursion, but ultimately the trip out was a quiet one. Kandros had only been able to patch his helmet – it wouldn't hold up to pressure or bullets, but it was enough to have the HUD and comms.

A notification chirped in his ear, a call alert routed from his omni-tool, and at first he looked down at his forearm curiously. He'd silenced those, he thought, and he brought it up solely to check his settings.

And then he swore. He'd silenced all but one. Kandros had a very particular, permanent exception to his do-not-disturb settings nowadays.

"What's up?" Scott asked, because of course local comm was open.

"Hold on," he said, and he muted it to take the call. He only hoped the helmets would dull enough of his side of the conversation to prevent him embarrassing himself. When Kandros accepted the request and got the channel open, the first thing he said was her name. "Ryder."

"Hey."

She sounded exhausted. Voeld's days muddled the passage of time in his mind, so he wasn't sure whether it was the time of day on the Nexus causing that tone of voice or something else. "It's good to hear you."

"Ah," she laughed. "Yeah. Tann said your last report was enough to release me. I'm not totally out of the woods, but it's an improvement."

Kandros realized that he hadn't considered not seeing this through to the end. His goal was to get Ryder cleared, of course, but it didn't seem right to drop the issue without so much as naming a new suspect. "Any protests?" he wondered.

"A few. Mostly on my behalf, but there were some…" There was a sigh, then a thud.

"Ryder?"

"I want to break into your apartment and sleep there."

He chuckled at that, then lifted his omni-tool to see if he could authorize her entry from here. It wasn't something he'd had reason to try before, but the permissions change went through without issue despite his not being on the Nexus. It was convenient, but it also seemed risky from a security standpoint, and he resolved to speak with ITSec on his return. "You don't need to break in," he said gently. In response, Kandros heard the soft hiss of a door, and he realized she'd been standing outside it. "Are you grounded?" he asked.

"For now," Ryder replied. Even with the answer, Kandros wasn't sure whether it was a relief that she couldn't make the attempt to come to Voeld and fix things herself.

And he was sure his voice lost most of its composed professionalism when he said, "You should stay at my place until I'm back."

She laughed – beautiful, always, but particularly given the circumstances – and Kandros closed his eyes at the sound of it. Ryder said, "All right, I'm curious. Why?"

"Selfishness," Kandros answered easily. "Might be nice to come home to someone."

There was silence, and he wondered whether he hadn't gone too far. Kandros racked his brain for any memory that might tell him whether it was offensive to humans, or offensive to her in particular, but he came up with nothing. He wasn't asking her to live with him – spirits, no, not yet – but was this still too much? Too domestic? And he'd barely begun to apologize when she stopped him.

"You're –" she started, and then she had to begin again entirely. "I'd like that," she said. "A lot."

Every word of retraction that had begun to form in his mind was lost in an exhale. "Good," was all he could get out, and that was the furthest thing from smooth. He could imagine Watt making fun of him for it.

Some feel of the shuttle's engine changed, rumbling through his feet – a quick glance through the window proved their descent. It was snowing.

"I need to go," he said. "Duty calls." And he meant it, 'duty' – he couldn't regret a duty to her.

"Tiran." She didn't say anything more for a moment. He took advantage, basking in the warmth brought on by her use of his name. Ryder breathed, close enough to her omni-tool for it to be audible, and she said, "Never leave."

It carried all the unspoken-but-necessary caveats of having been hers for such a short time, but the sentiment meant everything. It was 'I love you' in more words for his language and fewer in hers – this phrase they'd danced around so much that he'd only found four occasions to say it.

Kandros supposed it was time for a fifth. "I love you," he said. "Get some rest."

"I will. Call when you're done." It seemed Ryder's balance would stay at three for now. It didn't matter; Kandros planned to give her many more opportunities to revise the number. "Bye," she said, and that was all.

He looked up and switched back to local comm moments before landing, and the first thing he heard was Drack's laughter. "You're right," Drack said. "A pyjack taking a shit on his head would be less obvious."

And then Scott was laughing too, and Kandros got the distinct feeling that this wasn't about some abstract third party. "I'll bite," Kandros said. "What's funny?"

"You," Drack managed to eke out through a guffaw.

Of course it was. "Care to explain?"

"C'mon, you look half-drunk sitting there when you're talking to her. I'm old, but I'm not blind. That asshole Tann let her out?"

"She okay?" Scott asked, dropping the joke for the moment.

"She's out," Kandros said to Drack, "and she's fine," went to Scott. "Tired, that's all."

"Good," Drack replied. While he didn't say any more on the subject, Kandros would swear the old krogan was a hairsbreadth from smiling.

Scott dropped the subject as well in favor of hitting the door release, stepping out into a solid ten centimeters of snow without a second thought.

With the continuing storm, any footprints from the night before were long gone. An entrance was only half-visible, angled downward into the earth and taking the brunt of any wind-blown powder. The immediate area was flat and didn't offer much in the way of cover, but the lips of the short tunnel down could be used to decent effect. They were barely out of Avitus' search range, and Kandros wondered whether that would affect the Pathfinder's results.

"Drack," Kandros said, "watch our backs. We know they cloak. Scott," and he made this decision based on his own helmet being compromised, "get that door open. Be ready to move back." Kandros positioned himself, gun up, around the outside corner. Drack set up behind.

Scott had the door open five seconds after Kandros' go-ahead, and there was no gunfire. Something caught Scott's eye; he pulled his pistol before darting forward, finding cover in an alcove. "Safe to move," he said.

Kandros joined him. The hallway was dimly-lit, short, with four doors – two on each side. Kandros hated blind doors. He motioned for Scott to stay put, an Alliance hand signal coming faster than words for the first time that he could recall, and he opened the nearest door that would give Scott a firing angle.

Empty. One down.

Drack stepped into the base, exterior door sliding shut behind him. He tugged his helmet from his head, and Kandros had a front-on view of his immediate frown. "I hear something," he grumbled, and his distance from his helmet made the sound soft through the comm.

Kandros moved to the second door on the near side, and he opened it.

Empty.

"Which one?" Kandros asked.

Drack paused, then nodded toward the left rear door.

It wasn't entirely strategy guiding Kandros' next choice. "Take point," he told Drack. If there was anything dangerous on the other side, he was sure the krogan would appreciate the thrill.

With the three of them in position, Drack opened the door – and thick smoke burst violently into the hall.


	8. Hunting

Kandros ordered an immediate retreat to the entrance, pushing past Drack to override the door and prevent its closure. The temperature had spiked — it was 10 when they'd entered, now 22 and rising — and Kandros thanked his past self for having the foresight to run an upgraded scope on his sniper rifle. Visibility was shit, but with luck, he'd be able to tell whether anything was alive enough to move.

Drack and Scott had removed themselves to just outside the main door, as instructed. Before Kandros had the chance to raise his rifle, Drack jolted abruptly, rolling his weight and bending his knees, lurching upward. There was no opportunity to wonder what caused the phantom headbutt, because it knocked the salarian recipient out of cloak — or, on second look, it had actually knocked him out entirely. The figure crumpled, feet barely in the snow.

"Ha!" was Drack's resultant boast.

Scott kept his pistol trained on the salarian for safety, but he voiced his confusion. "You could see him?"

Kandros had to turn his attention back to the rear room, but he could hear Drack grunt. "No. I heard that shit in his pockets. Sticking his feet in the snow didn't hurt, either."

There was a pause in conversation. Kandros couldn't detect movement in the room beyond, but something was definitely on fire. He glanced up. The markings on the ceiling indicated that there should be a fire suppression system, but it was either broken or tampered with. After swapping back to his assault rifle, Kandros decided it was worth the risk to bet on 'tampered', and he was certain by now that the salarian was the only one here. It didn't make any tactical sense to still be in hiding. "Drack," he said, "take the salarian to the shuttle. Disable any emitters and restrain him." A quick glance showed Drack scoop their new friend off the floor. Scott relaxed, and Kandros told him to stay put.

Checking his shields before pushing forward was reflex. He ducked into the room, edging along the right side through smoke. He could almost smell it — either his imagination was getting the better of him or his helmet was leaking air.

The nice thing about working with prefabs from a single manufacturer was that the manual overrides were almost always in the same place, and the pull for the fire suppression system was exactly where he expected. Kandros yanked it down with force. He couldn't hear or see it begin to work, but he knew the process — a gaseous suppressant would be released from several storage cylinders, displacing oxygen in the room by its density. Fuel depleted, the flames would die. He'd guessed correctly: the system hadn't been completely sabotaged. The room was quickly cooling, and a well-hidden ventilation system kicked on after a time. Kandros breathed. It wasn't his imagination. The air was sour.

It didn't take long to determine that whatever might have been in the room was now completely destroyed, either shattered in a small, controlled explosion or melted in the subsequent flame. Kandros kicked through plastics and metals — storage crates and warped equipment — and he was mostly grateful that he didn't find any bodies.

Scott was still waiting by the entrance when he returned. Kandros didn't bother raising his gun to check the last room; it was empty, same as the first pair. He wasn't even sure why the salarian had stuck around for so long, though he suspected it had something to do with the lack of a shuttle. This bunker was far enough out of the way that the salarian must have been dropped off and, more than likely, abandoned.

It supported the idea of a partner, at any rate. This one wasn't the marksman — the sure shot who'd killed the other twenty-nine. Kandros' mind went to defenses, disgustingly. He hadn't had to argue guilt very often in the military, but it was now an unfortunate reality that he was becoming far too comfortable with. The partner might argue self-defense with Ryder as the precedent, but even with the standard of care set by the Nilken Rensus debacle, eleven separate sites was difficult to excuse. The partner might also argue that they had nothing to do with it at all, and Kandros hoped the autopsy findings would clear that up.

"Kandros."

The sound of his name drew him back from his thoughts. It was Avitus' voice, through shared comm. "Find something?" Kandros asked.

"Yeah." A pause. "Where was Ryder eight weeks ago?"

Kandros let out a sharp exhale. He wasn't sure how he was supposed to know that. Ryder's schedule could be politely described as 'erratic', and Kandros only recalled — oh. That might have been the week she demonstrated a novel use for kitchen counters. Still, when he said, "Not sure," it was honest. Remembering one very pleasant evening didn't say much for the rest of the week.

"It's worth finding out," Avitus said. "I found seven bodies here, and they've been dead about that long."

"Same MO?"

Avitus made a sound in the affirmative. "And more. The terminals were wiped clean, but SAM was able to get something out of the encrypted backups. It'll take a little while to process."

Nearly done. The phrase dragged itself across Kandros' thoughts like a thick brush over canvas, colored by thoughts of Ryder. He didn't let relief flood in, not yet, but Kandros was willing to admit tentative optimism. "Rendezvous at the outpost," he instructed. "Is Vetra on comm?"

Drack didn't hesitate to voice his thoughts on that. "Not with what you told her to do. If she found something on that tower, she's gonna follow up."

The beat of silence following Drack's statement was enough confirmation to be sure. Kandros didn't question with whom or why it might keep her off comm; however privy Drack was to Vetra's dealings, the krogan was sure to be just as tight-lipped.

Their salarian cloak-user was awake when Kandros returned to the shuttle, eyes closed and feigning unconsciousness. Drack had noticed as well, snorting at the ceiling with an exaggerated tilt of his chin when he caught Kandros' attention. Scott paid no mind one way or the other, dropping down in one of the seats, slouched, with his pistol still sitting relaxedly in his right hand. An appropriate precaution in either case. Kandros stripped his helmet and sat down beside.

The flight back to the outpost was dead silent.

After landing, Kandros was the one hoisting the prisoner up by the thin plastic strip Drack had found to restrain him. "Name?" he asked. The salarian was done pretending and stood on his own, but Kandros received little more than a glare in return. "All right," Kandros said. "I'm taking you to a medic. Your DNA will be enough."

"Belam," came reluctantly, syllables slow-spoken despite the species stereotype.

Having his name would speed things up, necessary or not. Kandros motioned for Scott to take hold for a second, and he pulled up his omni-tool to make a request for records from the Nexus. "You're still seeing the medic," Kandros said. Being knocked out cold was dangerous in most species, and he wanted to confirm identity by DNA regardless. A tilt of his head was sufficient for Scott to follow the unspoken instruction to escort the salarian to medical.

Kandros risked a pat to Drack's shoulder as he hopped out; he needed to check with Vetra on the comm tower results. Drack grunted, but not unhappily.

Calling Ryder was also on his to-do list. If she'd slept right after they spoke, she might have woken by now — in his bed, his mind supplied, and without him there. He lingered on that thought a bit longer than he should have.

Kandros found it harder nowadays to differentiate between loneliness and longing, and he wasn't sure whether to be terrified by that. It was one thing to tell someone you loved them; it was entirely another to explore what it really meant. He'd told her some of the less heroic moments of his career, mostly on weaker days when shades of long-dead guilt rose to the surface, and Kandros wondered what she would think of him when she knew all of it.

Logically, he knew the stages of a relationship, and he had reason to suspect he'd moved past 'infatuated'. They disagreed on militarism, gun mods, and film genres; they couldn't survive on the same foods, fought the constraints of their positions at every step, and didn't agree on whether his carapace or her hair was worse when trying to curl together in sleep. He trusted Ryder, but each new admission was a chance she'd find something about him too much to bear. That he recognized their difficulties and considered them worth the trouble — that he could see this working long-term — only made not having her harder to imagine. Did humans have a defined phase of courtship for that realization?

He was directed to Vetra in one of the storage rooms, and she was working frantically at her omni-tool. "Hold on a second," she said. "I need to win an argument."

Kandros exhaled sharply, because of course she did. "Did you get anything from the comm logs?"

Vetra looked up at him suddenly, fingers stopped and mandibles tight. "You think I'm arguing with someone for fun?" And then she was back at it, her silent displeasure punctuated by seconds of stillness as she received replies. Vetra Nyx seemed like someone difficult to anger; this was unusual, whatever it was.

Kandros tucked in against the wall and crossed his arms. If this took more than a few minutes, he'd leave her to it.

It didn't, thankfully, and Vetra finally dropped her arm with a sigh. "Feels too much like a weapons deal," she muttered, shifting her weight. She looked over at Kandros. "Someone was careful about their transmissions to the Nexus. Their messages didn't look right. No one I recognize for the usual contraband, though." Vetra's gaze flitted to the still-open doorway, and Kandros looked — just a passerby. "We should get back to the Nexus. I've got a lead, but we'll lose it if we wait."

"Forward it to Lt. Sajax. She can act on it immediately."

Vetra scoffed, "I don't need the reputation of getting security involved. No offense."

It wasn't unreasonable. Kandros couldn't expect Vetra to give up her contacts' trust so easily. There had recently been a rash of Kadara-produced goods which violated Nexus safety regulations, and the people involved would value their freedom highly. "We caught that cloaked salarian," he told her. "Voeld doesn't have the space to hold him, so we'll take him back to the Nexus. You can do whatever you need to."

His willingness to drop the topic of contraband seemed to surprise her. "You're not half bad," Vetra said.

"Don't say that before I ask what the argument was about," Kandros replied. And, given her improved mood, he figured there was a decent chance she'd even tell him.

Right on the mark, too. "An asari called Maezia. She didn't come out and admit she'd be on the Nexus, so I had to ask someone to verify." Vetra's mandibles tightened again at the recent memory. "I don't know what crawled up his carapace, but he was being an ass today."

Kandros immediately wanted to know whether Maezia was mentioned anywhere in the salarian's — Belam's — background. He pulled up his omni-tool to check whether his file had come through. It had, and Kandros felt the pleased noise run through his vocal cavity before he could stop it. Vetra, predictably, laughed.

More importantly, he thought as he scrolled down, Maezia was mentioned early and often. "She's married to our salarian friend," he said. Odd, because he was salarian — even those who had families with asari didn't often bother. Humans seemed to put the most weight on marriage, and they had some societally-ingrained addiction to wedding ceremonies. Kandros wondered what Ryder thought of them. But a salarian and an asari wasn't exactly the combination he'd expected.

"That's too much of a coincidence, isn't it?" Vetra said.

Kandros flicked his mandibles in agreement. "Brief Drack and tell him to notify his pilot. We'll leave when Avitus returns." That shouldn't be long. Avitus hadn't had as much distance to travel, but he was smart enough to document his findings thoroughly — for all his faults, he wanted to do right by Ryder as much as anyone. Kandros said, "I'd like a minute alone, if you don't mind."

Vetra agreed without comment or question. He locked the door behind her when she left and, after a moment to breathe, called Ryder.

No answer.

Kandros was disappointed but not surprised. Between her job and her current circumstances, there were a thousand reasons she might be unable to respond. He settled for a message instead:

> Tiran Kandros: On my way home.


	9. Sex

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that the rating was raised to 'explicit' for this chapter. If you want to avoid that, then skip everything after Kandros wakes up. I couldn't find a way to do a reunion without banging, sorry.

Voeld didn't have much in the way of wildlife. Reductions in kett and Roekarr conflicts opened opportunities for Milky Way scientists — some Initiative, others exile — but the promise of remnant-assisted terraforming added a strict time limit. If conditions became too inhospitable to a population, if it couldn't adapt, that species would die. Put more simply, making worlds livable would irreversibly change or destroy entire ecosystems.

The scientists Avitus found had been studying populations of small animals with a knack for burrowing into cliffsides. There were several prey species, but only one predator — basic physical information had been recorded by Nexus scientists several months ago. The exile scientists took their studies somewhat further.

If a new predator was introduced, the prey species were completely incapable of defending themselves. They cowered in the dark until they were torn apart. If the 'recognized' predator was introduced, the prey species would undergo an abrupt paradigm shift. The prey became violent, inefficient but deadly. It didn't take long for the scientists to realize that removing the predator's vocal chords neutered the prey's reaction to their presence.

In the same environment lived a parasite. They adapted to the nervous systems of their varied hosts, using the hosts' bodies as breeding grounds, and they also adapted to the single predator which posed a threat. They used their influence over the hosts' motor functions to defend themselves: it wasn't the prey reacting to the predator, it was the parasite — or 'symbiote' was probably more accurate in this case.

"It takes a sick mind to look at this and decide they want to weaponize it," Avitus said at the conclusion of his summary. "I can see the appeal. Poison, you get a couple people before someone notices. This, if they perfected it? Taint the food for that week, then bam. One sound, and you've compromised an entire colony."

Kandros watched the Nexus through the window as they waited for docking clearance. "Take everything to the tech lab. Samples, reports, all of it." At home, Kandros might have put in a recommendation for a high classification level and a mission to wipe out the threatening species, but the Initiative was too small and too different. "We need to know how to identify and remove the parasites, and we need to include it in standard medical and food sanitization protocols."

Avitus nodded. "I'll take it up. You going home?"

A glance at the prisoner, secured to a seat and under Drack's attentive guard, should have answered Avitus' question. Kandros had an obligation to escort the bastard to a cell.

"After that," Avitus clarified.

"I should work," Kandros replied. The idea of going to Ryder, particularly given that it was just past midnight, was appealing. But Kandros knew he'd left APEX in a bad place with Sajax the last few days, and he'd definitely missed a scheduled briefing with the few journalists and freelancers who had cropped up on the Nexus since Ryder's arrival. Honestly, Kandros wasn't sure which he enjoyed least — politics or press.

"Don't make me drag you," Drack grumbled, and he was the last person Kandros had expected to hear that sort of sentiment from. "You piss off Ryder, I'm the one who's gonna feel it."

It was an exaggeration. Kandros couldn't imagine Ryder being careless in a fight over something so minor, but he accepted Drack's point regardless. "I'm sure a krogan dragging a restrained salarian down the hallway will go over well."

Drack laughed. "'Course it won't. I'm looking forward to it."

"I'll keep him out of trouble," Vetra offered. She was seated comfortably, one leg crossed over the other, and she'd taken it upon herself to keep a lightly-dozing Scott somewhat vertical in his seat.

Of all the arguments he might possibly have lost, Kandros supposed this one wasn't so bad.

After they docked and went their separate ways, he was left outside his own apartment, hesitating. Hesitating. Spirits, of all things. Kandros couldn't identify the cause of his nervousness. Ryder would be inside, he knew. He hadn't had her alone in — well, far too long.

Having skipped Ops, he was still armed and equipped; he shifted his helmet from the grip of his right hand to his left. And, lacking any excuse to remain standing awkwardly in the hallway, Kandros keyed open the door.

The bathroom light was on and dimmed. It occurred to him that he should clean himself up, and Kandros carefully removed his equipment: the guns went to the counter, his armor to the sofa.

Ryder was in bed, asleep. She was on her side, pillow beneath her head and right arm beneath that. One of those light undershirts clung to her shape, allowing him a near-unobstructed view of her shoulders and the shape of her breasts. The sheets were a little less forgiving with her waist. Kandros tugged off his gloves and the top half of his undersuit, but his attention never left her. He wanted to touch her, desperately, but he wouldn't be able to let go once he did. Kandros let his mandibles fall into a smile before making his way to the shower. He rushed it, of course; hot water lacked its usual comforts in the face of something better.

When he returned, nearly dry and still unclothed, Ryder was on her back. Her arms stretched for a second above her head before she relaxed them. "Hey," she said, voice distorted from tiredness.

Kandros didn't reply. He found he'd much rather climb into bed and kiss her — and he did, hovering over her and lingering. The feel of his own sheets beneath his hands made the exhaustion catch up with force; he collapsed beside Ryder a little less than gracefully. She turned and gathered him up, collected every piece of himself he'd fractured under the stress of proving her innocence, and just having her here was enough to mend them. He held on to her in turn, and he slept.

When he woke again, it was to artificial sunlight and an empty bed, and noise from the kitchen told him where Ryder had gotten to. After a moment fighting grogginess, Kandros rolled over to watch. Whatever she was making, she'd only just started. Her hair was mussed from sleep, and she hadn't bothered with trousers — not that the naked turian admiring her from bed could criticize on that point.

Obligation made him sit up — slouching, knees bent — to check the time. Ryder glanced over at the movement. It was past 04:00, which made him late for his shift if he chose to show up at all. Technically speaking, he'd expected to be gone a full week and had told Tann and Sajax as much. He knew there were things he could and should be doing, but right now, 'technically speaking' and a moment of privacy with Ryder were enough excuse to defer. So instead, he said, "I can't complain about the view."

Ryder laughed, fingers working at a packet of something he didn't recognize. She must have bought groceries. "Flatterer," she accused.

"Come back to bed."

She stilled to look at him, and, to his surprise, he didn't feel the slightest bit self-conscious about it. After a moment, she'd made her decision; Ryder dropped what she'd been doing and rinsed her hands. He barely had the chance to prop himself up with both pillows before she climbed onto the mattress to sit across his lap.

When Kandros pulled her close, it was to say 'I missed you' against her ear. But his honesty didn't stop desire from following up, his mouth against her neck in careful approximations of kisses. He found her hips between the hem of her shirt and the elastic of her underwear, and he dragged his fingertips across her skin. That was enough to make Ryder's breathing erratic; the feel of blunt talons in sensitive places always riled her up, and Kandros nuzzled into her jaw in recognition of it.

"You never skip work," she pointed out breathily.

That put a damper on things. Kandros repositioned his hands to her waist — on top of her clothes, not beneath them. "I don't," he agreed. And the reminder said that he shouldn't now, either.

But he must have completely misinterpreted the intention behind the comment, because Ryder grabbed him by the back of his head and pressed her mouth to his, lips parted to send her tongue on a search for his own. He grunted mostly from surprise, but she ground against him, and at that point her plans for the morning were unmistakeable. She might have wanted him to say 'this is worth skipping work' or something similar, but the more he fretted over the state of the militia, the more likely it was that he'd leave bed for it.

Her breasts were effectively unreachable while pressed against him. He tested how far he could reach with her legs draped over him and his thighs raised, but the answer was, apparently, 'not very'. They didn't meet properly at the hips in this position, either.

Kandros used a gentler version of a hand-to-hand combat move to flip her, leaving her mouth only for the moment it took for him to glance down and double check his position: his legs between hers, hands outside her shoulders. Ryder laughed once at him for that, then tugged her undershirt over her head, letting it fall to the floor behind her. She was braless, and Kandros set to work on her left breast with his mouth. Breasts were becoming strangely sexual by her reactions alone: the way she inhaled sharply and tilted her hips upward into his.

Ryder put one hand on either side of his face to pull him upward, meaning to steal another kiss. It was only when she put actual pressure against his right mandible that he had some hint it wasn't completely healed. "Shit," he said, and he'd pulled out of her grip before he could articulate further. The dichotomy between his half-emerged state of arousal and the pain in his face was uncomfortable, to say the least.

"What's wrong?"

Kandros wasn't about to miss out on sex for a bruise. "Injury," he answered. "The details can wait."

Ryder seemed accepting of that. Her second attempt at eliciting a kiss came with her thumb and forefinger against his chin. Kandros obliged but noted that she seemed hesitant to touch him elsewhere.

"Right mandible," he said between presses of her lips, "and left spur." And that had been the correct information to provide, because Ryder then slid her palms against the skin of his waist.

The friction reminded him to reach across her for the lubricant. She'd joked several times in the past that if they found more time for intimacy, his sheets would fall apart in the laundry within the week. It was true that the lubricant made a mess, but he'd probably send the sheets through for their combined fluids alone.

Spirits, he had the most attractive woman in the galaxy in his bed, and he was thinking about injuries and laundry. If that didn't scream 'stable relationship', Kandros wasn't sure what would.

She plucked the bottle from between his fingers and flipped the cap, gathering a generous dollop before dropping it square on her chest — and that confused him, because he wasn't immediately certain why it would be useful there. Nevertheless, Ryder spread it outward from her sternum, massaging her own breasts when her fingers made it far enough. Kandros shifted his weight to free up one hand, and he humored an impulse with a firm pinch of her right nipple.

Her hands had since wandered elsewhere, to the skin of her abdomen and inner thighs. Kandros turned his mouth to work on her collarbone, soft and simple nips as he considered how best to divest her of her panties.

That made it something of a surprise when she took hold of his cock and pressed the tip to her entrance — he could feel her other hand holding the fabric aside, a testament to her impatience. "Are you sure that's comfortable?" he asked. Ryder's answer was to pull him in, her legs behind his thighs and one hand at his waist working in concert. One of these days, he was going to learn not to question this sort of thing.

He hadn't realized how much he'd missed the heat of being inside her until just this moment, feeling it again. The slickness against his first thrust was entirely her — Kandros could tell the difference between that and the lubricant, and he could never admit to her the pride he took in causing it.

Ryder's free hand moved, then, to his back. She pulled him close, enough that it was more comfortable to drop to his elbows, and then the business at her chest made sense: when need compelled him to move again, his skin rubbed against most of hers. Ryder had known exactly what she wanted.

He couldn't overstate the importance of touch. Ryder's satin, naked skin; his own, more a hide, pressed against her as he moved. He breathed through his closed mouth, teeth barely impairing the air he stole from beside her neck. Kandros wasn't sure whether it was emotion or hormone that kept his heart feeling as though it might burst from his chest. He said her name once — twice when he felt she hadn't heard him, and she gasped in his ear at the second.

Kandros took his time: measured, patient, a steady rock of his hips against hers. His strokes were deep but short, and she didn't seem to mind: Ryder whispered his name like the lewdest prayer, told him to never stop, said more that he missed because comprehension took a dive in the face of lovemaking like this. With her — spirits, he loved her. He told her so and forgot her answer in the next thrust. She was warm and swollen and perfect around his cock, a foreign sex he wanted to deserve. Her fingers slipped and he felt the uncomfortable pressure of tight fabric on one side, but he still mourned the loss of closeness when she pushed him back, palms against his chest.

"Hold on," was slurred between her lips, and she drew herself off — he slid wetly against the inside of her thigh — and then she'd folded her knees up against his abdomen to finally free herself of that damned underwear. She tried to turn over, but he wouldn't have it.

"I want to stay like this," he said. The idea of losing full-body contact in favor of something more pleasurable but less intimate was abhorrent enough to justify begging. "Please."

And he was lucky to catch the look on her face, eyes gentle and lips curved, her skin flushed from sex. Ryder whispered her consent in a kiss, returning her legs to either side of his hips and wrapping both hands around his back. He was hers, fully and without a doubt.

He preceded himself with the rub of a knuckle, texture against her stiff clitoris. Ryder stifled her moan in his shoulder, and he pushed back in to the hilt, dropping his weight more heavily against her pelvis as he moved. That provided necessary stimulation to the small bundle of nerves, enough that 'faster' became her mantra, and he accommodated her request as best he could without changing the angle or letting go.

Every part of her lit every part of him on fire. She was perfect, slow breaths and sharp moans, her hips rising to meet his every motion. When he came, it was abrupt and unexpected — no time to warn her or hesitate long enough for her own orgasm — and it made him curl forward with a swear as he pulsed inside. He let his forehead meet hers before the pleasure faded. "Sorry," he breathed.

Ryder only murmured words of contentment and kissed every part of him she could reach, gentle touches of lips adding an entirely new dimension of sensation to his climax. When he reached down to reciprocate, she tucked her fingers between his to stop him. "It's fine," she said. "I enjoyed that."

Kandros didn't have the energy to argue. He cupped the side of her face with his palm instead, and he kissed her. It occurred to him: "I need to speak with Tann today."

She groaned and dragged one forearm across her eyes. "I never thought I'd have to ask that you not mention Tann in bed."

Kandros chuckled, then extricated himself to go clean up. He could barely tear his eyes away from Ryder, limp and slick with swollen lips and her legs still spread. "He'll come up with some kind of punishment," he continued as he forced himself to the bathroom. The lubricant always justified a full shower. "I didn't clear the investigation with anyone."

He got the water started in silence, and Ryder plodded into the room as he stepped beneath the spray. "I know," was all she said on the subject before joining him.


	10. Consequence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, life interfered and I had to re-read the fic three times to remember what I was doing... my bad. I actually have a partial outline for a Part 5, so this series isn't marked 'complete' yet.

Kandros arrived at work just before 06:00. Sajax was surprised to see him, betrayed by a legitimate double take. "Tann wants a word," was the first thing she said to him.

"He probably has a few hundred words for me," Kandros muttered. And, more directly: "I want a summary of the mission logs from my absence. Order them by priority. If something has to happen today, I want to know about it."

Sajax agreed and turned to rope Sgt. Nels in for an assist. Kandros glanced over the APEX logs -- they were behind, despite Ryder not being around to add to the pile. He'd need to chat with Sajax to find out why. If it amounted to some gap in her skills, it should be simple enough to resolve.

Kandros decided to ignore Tann for now, both because he couldn't bring himself to give a damn and because he needed to allow Vetra some time to pursue the asari conspirator on her own terms.

Around 08:00, he finally noticed the loiterers. There were two at first, both turian with arms crossed, and Sajax encouraged them to move along. Then, after a quarter hour, three humans took their place.

"Pretty quiet for protesters," Kandros remarked to Nels after Sajax had similarly dismissed the newer group.

Nels shrugged. "Sajax detained six yesterday."

"The usual?"

The salarian paused his typing and flexed his fingers. "Well," he said, "they believe Ryder should be replaced."

Kandros exhaled sharply. It wasn't unexpected. Between the accusations and general permissiveness, concern that Pathfinders could get away with anything was probably at an all-time high. "Anything to worry about?" he asked.

Nels replied in the negative, and that was all that mattered. It was important, in Kandros' opinion, for people to feel they had the freedom to visibly object to administrative decisions. 'Feel' being the operative word, of course; if suppressing dissent would keep the peace, Kandros wouldn't hesitate to step in. It was a point of policy Ryder did not agree with.

There was a faint chime, and Kandros lifted his omni-tool to see a message from Vetra.

> Vetra Nyx: That person, Maezia: probably stolen ID, came in as a freelance trader. Don't you people run biometric checks?

He replied.

> Tiran Kandros: If you just want to complain about security, there are official channels.

> Vetra Nyx: Who's complaining?

That last message came with an attachment: several documents relating to the asari's identity and an audio file. Kandros risked the automatic transcriber. Being uncertain of the contents, he wasn't about to play the file openly.

Skimming the transcription, he determined that the file was a recorded conversation between Maezia and another unidentified individual. Likely Vetra's contact, if she'd clipped the recording this carefully. And, true to Vetra's offhand comment before returning to the Nexus, it sounded as though Maezia intended to sell the parasite as a weapon. The contact declined, and the recording abruptly ended there.

Nels caught Kandros' muttered curse. "Is there something wrong?"

Kandros forwarded the attachments to Sajax and copied them to the evidence archive. He was officially on-duty at this point, and he couldn't touch this -- he ran the risk of tainting it -- regardless of how much he wanted to bring the asari in personally. "Sajax," he said. "Weapons deal related to the scientist murders. Are you up to date on my reports?"

His lieutenant twitched her mandibles in a terse 'yes' from across the room and brought her forearm upward to open her omni-tool.

It was difficult to stand back and watch, given his level of investment in this case. Kandros managed to distract himself by catching up on reports, then by scheduling APEX drops. And over the course of the next several hours, he could only monitor discreetly and detachedly as Sajax left and returned to Ops with the asari suspect, as she called Ryder back for an additional statement about her whereabouts eight weeks prior, and as the asari was questioned a second time and could be heard yelling profanities as Sajax left her cell.

Kandros didn't take offense when Ryder didn't stop on her way back out of Ops. She'd mentioned when he left this morning that she would be seeing Scott today, and Sajax had more than likely interrupted. Kandros caved to temptation and sent a message inviting Ryder out after his shift. Seeing her, it suddenly mattered less whether he'd be completely caught up on work by then. He would carve time out for her in whatever way he had to.

Her reply, agreeing, was immediate.

Sajax's report was filed in the early evening. The asari had, thankfully, tried to pin the entire mess on her husband. It was a terrible excuse, and several of her assertions were provably false based on the audio Vetra had acquired. On reinterview, the salarian wasn't interested in taking the fall for killing a slew of Nexus scientists -- that was where he drew the line, apparently -- and he was extremely cooperative once Sajax pointed out that he had only killed outlaws. That approach hinted at a lighter sentence for him.

Kandros only realized he'd forgotten about Tann when he received an angry e-mail titled 'Re: Kandros Duty Status'. It merely said, "Here. Now." Addison and Kesh were copied. Kandros wasn't entirely sure whether that was a bad sign, but Tann's relative incoherence definitely was.

He ended up at Tann's door at the same time as Kesh, who laughed and told him not to worry so much. He entered second. Addison had already found a seat and planted herself in front of Tann's window, a bottle of water perched precariously beside her thigh.

Tann spoke the moment he saw that all parties were present. "All matters pertaining to Pathfinder Ryder must be delegated to other members of the security staff."

Addison clarified for Kandros' benefit. "Tann read all the reports."

Kandros appreciated that; it would have been his first question. "I don't plan to apologize," was what he said instead.

Tann frowned. "You're usually much more reasonable."

"Nexus Security doesn't have enough staff to carry out this kind of investigation."

"Perhaps you should have left it to Pathfinder Rix?"

Kandros found a spot by the wall and reclined against it. "I might have if he'd told me he was going." It was a lie; even knowing Avitus intended to investigate further, Kandros knew he wouldn't have been able to leave well enough alone. "I wasn't on duty. When I received new evidence this morning, I forwarded it to Sajax."

Tann actually looked agitated. He took one step to his right as though he intended to pace, then reconsidered, and he crossed his hands behind his back instead. "You violated the spirit of our agreement, if not the letter. We came to an agreement in your absence." His gaze flicked to the other two before settling back on Kandros, perhaps to silently offer them the chance to object. Neither did. "I want you to know that this is your final warning. I am perfectly willing to accept the loss of military efficiency that would result from replacing you with Lieutenant Sajax. I would prefer not to. Are we clear?"

"Yes," Kandros said.

So Tann continued, "The prior conflict-of-interest restrictions will stand. I'm also revoking your travel clearance."

It was Addison who stood up to Tann on that point. "We didn't discuss this."

Tann only stared at her blankly. "Is there any legitimate need for Kandros to leave the Nexus?"

A reply conspicuously absent, Addison twisted open the cap of her water and took a drink. Kesh scowled and began a sentence that Kandros' translator didn't catch up to before he interrupted.

"That's fine," Kandros said. "I'll send a status report in the next hour. I need to get back to work."

After a pause -- a somewhat stunned one, if Tann's sudden stiff posture was any indication -- Tann inclined his head toward the ramp. Kandros nodded at Addison and Kesh in turn, and he saw himself out.

Ultimately, something would have to be done. The four of them didn't like one another for the most part, but there was always trust, and that was now deteriorating. Despite his excuses to Tann, Kandros was very aware that the destabilization was due entirely to his behavior. As much as he wanted to avoid bringing politics into his relationship, it was starting to seem as though the only way to rebuild would be to convince Tann that there were benefits to the head of Nexus Security being intimately involved with a Pathfinder.

He'd have to come up with benefits at all, first. Until he had that, it was best to keep his head down and defer to the acting director. Kandros couldn't shake the discomfort his conclusion caused.

Kandros ended his shift on time only because he had incentive to do so. He met Ryder at the tram, leading her aside with a gentle touch at her shoulder while several other people slipped by on their way toward Ops.

"What's wrong?" was all she had to ask.

It was comforting and a little bit terrifying that she could tell. Kandros resolved to explain later and told her as much before leaning forward to rest his forehead against hers. Spirits, he was tired. It was as though his body had decided that Ryder was the only person with whom his exhaustion was allowed to show itself. "Hydroponics is nice after they dim the lights," he said. "I noticed some flickering sensors behind the plants."

Ryder laughed. She brought her hands to either side of his face, but she didn't push him away. "Is that where we're going?"

Kandros hummed, and Ryder extricated herself from his affectionate nuzzle to move back toward the tram. He took her hand, carefully choosing which gaps to slip his three fingers into, and Kandros brought the backs of her fingers up to press against his mouth in a gesture he'd recently seen from a human couple in Vortex. The fact that Ryder didn't laugh at him was positive feedback.

Neither of them spoke again until they were seated at hydroponics on a familiar bench. After a moment, Ryder asked, "Are they bright?"

Kandros didn't immediately understand the significance of the question. He turned his attention to the lights behind the plants and mentally tried to gauge their intervals. But after a moment, he remembered Drack's hearing, and he suddenly felt the urge to apologize. "You can't see them," he guessed.

"Barely," she admitted.

His grip on her hand tightened involuntarily. This was one of the rare reminders that she was human; they would never really experience things the same way. They were working around their differences in expressing affection, but they would never eat the same rations or have quite the same culture or, apparently, see the same visible spectrum.

Then Ryder leaned into his shoulder and said, "One hundred and six, right?"

It was the number of days since he'd asked to treat her to a drink, and it occurred to Kandros that the rest didn't really matter. After all, they shared time.


End file.
